Quicktime to Anger

I hate Quicktime. Honestly, it's the new RealPlayer. Sure, others have ranted extensively on what sucks this crappy program, but I feel I have a few new contributions to add.

First of all, I don't like secondary players. I use Media Player Classic, a very nice little stand-alone media player, for all my video needs, and Winamp for all my audio needs. Why? Well, a large part of it is familiarity. I will jump through hoops to get one familiar program to run everything I need, rather than go between a bunch of other programs, just because I like familiar program GUIs.

Second, I'm a very minimalistic guy. I like my desktop tidy (save for some temporary files which are regularly cleared), my menus small, and my experience unimpaired by huge buttons and other pointless crap. Quicktime is the mother of unnecessarily gigantic user interfaces.



Another complaint is that I like to view images in Firefox, my preferred browser. If I want to check out an image in full-size, Firefox does a very nice job of letting me do that. However, since installing Quicktime (due to the demands of some dumb website or another--use Flash!), Firefox will automatically assume that I want to either save or open the file in another program, which is completely unnecessary since I could just view it in Firefox! True it's only a few seconds' inconvenience, but it's a damn annoying one, regardless.

Conversely, Firefox doesn't prompt me to instantly download or open media links I click on, such as a link to a podcast mp3, but instead it is opened in my browser, under Quicktime, and automatically starts playing. Now, let me get one thing straight; I despise autoplay. Even if I'm viewing YouTube videos, on the video's main page, I despise autoplay. Why? Because I'm usually juggling tabs, multitasking, and I don't want to begin media until I'm ready to focus on it. Sure, load it for viewing, YouTube (and all other media players, for that matter), but don't play it until I say so!

Where was I? Oh, yeah. So having to then right-click and pick "save target as..." is just a little more inconvenient, but it's an unnecessary inconvenience, which is why it pisses me off so much.

Finally, why is Quicktime even necessary? There is a lovely Quicktime Alternative, but that unfortunately doesn't work for embedded videos, yet why are there still embedded Quicktime videos? MOV videos are way, unnecessarily huge, so why doesn't someone just use a divx or xvid-codec avi, or even a sucky wmv? For that matter, why not a Flash wrapper? Sure, MOV files may be good for editing, but not streaming! Stop that shit!