I had created a blog entry and had a movie to go along with it, and went to post the combo to my site. BUT, I always, always double-check online after I finish to make sure everything shows up as I planned it. Well the movie would not play! I checked my work, everything seemed to be OK, and I could play the file locally on my drive, but getting there through the website wasn’t working for me. Hell, I could even play the movie off of my iDisk (where I host my site), but just not through the worldwide web!

So I did a whole bunch of troubleshooting. It was very frustrating, I spent probably 6 hours trying to figure this out, removing plugins, reloading QuickTime, flushes caches, nothing seemed to alleviate the issue.

So this morning, I called Applecare. Hell, maybe they’ve seen it before, maybe they can point me in the right direction.

Turns out, no. They pretty much had me walk through all the steps I had already tried. With one important difference. I had checked all the accounts, all accounts on my machine behaved similarly, so I knew it was a system-wide issue. I pulled all the plugins out and that didn’t help. BUT, I had pulled all the plugins out of the plugins folder only. I DID NOT remove or even check the Quicktime Folder within my system library. Skipped it. Didn’t even think of it for whatever reason.

Well the tech had me open that folder, and I saw a file called “perinian.component” that didn’t jive with me. I checked a test machine that was working fine, and sure enough, it didn’t have this component installed. Bing! Removed the component, restarted machine, and wouldn’t you know it, suddenly the files were playing like they were supposed to. Sweet.

And that’s not all, either. Removing that component also made Safari – my browser of choice – much much faster, especially when loading multiple tabs. I have no idea quite why, as it doesn't make total sense that it would impact these things, but...? So if Safari seems sluggish, takes a long time to load pages, you have issues with avi files – like not playing at all, or only playing video with a white screen and no audio – then perhaps you have that component in your QuickTime folder as well. And perhaps you should trash it and restart.



What is it, anyway?
Well I had it in my folder because I just migrated my old machine to this new machine when I bought it back in November. It’s a Quicktime plugin that aids in the playback of certain files within Quicktime (at least it used to…)I had probably installed it long before, when QT couldn’t natively play as many avi codecs are it now supports, and the plugin was necessary to see/play certain files. Probably d/l’d I trying to support & play youtube videos, one of its more popular features (that it turns out I didn't ever use).

I’m pretty sure that anymore, it was just butting heads with QT over the files, and hence QT couldn’t figure out quite what to do with them. It’s probably an issue with compatibility with Leopard, the newest Apple OS, if nothing else.

A quick look around the intarwebs, and you can see that others have had problems, too. I just hadn't gotten that far along with my troubleshooting to have pinpointed perian yet.

Though now I have. Problem solved!

Peace.

Tags: Technology