I am going to start throwing out there some new types of blogs that are very different than the ones we have posted before. Because I also do some support for my fellow missionaries and have to support my own small home network, I have decided to blog problems that I have and the fixes I have found for them. Basically, if I have to search for an answer to a problem and I have a hard time finding the answer, I figure the more people who post the fix means its easier for the next person with the same problem to find the answer. (Did that even make sense?)

Sorry to most of my regular readers as you can feel free to skip them as they will be geekie and technical. So here’s the first one:

Problem: When using Front Row or Finder on Mac OS X, whenever I “preview” an AVI file, it seems to take forever to come up i.e. really long time. I was finding this especially to be true with Front Row when watching my movies and shows. Before it would be a second or two max before the show was ready to be viewed. Then something happened to make them take minutes (like 1-5 minutes depending on the size of the file).

Equipment: MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.10 (Yes, I have a Mac - No, I am not going to go on about how Mac’s are better - It seems I can crash anything, Macs and Windows alike. Even blew up a Linux install but that took some work). Using Flip4Mac to help with the AVI files within QuickTime

Solution/Fix: Aparantly, when my Apple automatic updates happened a little bit ago, it updated QuickTime to QT 7.2 . With this update, things went screwy. Now QuickTime 7.2 update on its own isn’t bad but it makes the Flip4Mac plugin now work properly so it creates the problems in bringing up the viewers. So to fix this, you need to reinstall your Flip4Mac. I understand this might also be the case with Perian and Divx. When I did this, everything started to work lightning fast again.

Hope this helps someone out there. If it does, please leave me a comment so I’ll know. Thanks.