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October 06, 2004Those Germans sure do make a good multimedia viewer...
I had myself a David-versus-Goliath moment yesterday evening.
I'd driven into L.A. and picked up about half a dozen CDs with anime fansubs in .mov format. I got home to discover that--lo and behold--QuickTime doesn't have a clue as to how to run them. Oh, I'd get sound, and I'd get a cute little thumbnail preview of what I was supposed to be seeing, but no image.
The next three hours were an increasingly numb blur of downloading, installing and uninstalling sundry codecs, none of which did the trick. I also waded through help forums for various programs, the users/designers of which all seemed to look down their noses at PC users, and to whom would hardly deign to give troubleshooting tips.
The situation was getting grim. I was faced with the prospect of having to drive into L.A. to watch the fansubs--which would have been fine, had I not made the Riverside-to-L.A. round trip excursion four times since last week, and have it on my schedule another three times in the next week and a half. Looking around the internet for a non-QuickTime .mov viewer, I found a page that hawked QuickView Pro.
QuickView Pro is a DOS-based multimedia viewer that weighs in at a whopping 500 kilobytes. I laughed at the thought of this tiny, puny program succeeding where the likes of QuickTime and DivX had failed. I ran the program, the menus of which instantly reminded me of the good old pre-Windows days of Norton Commander.
But would you believe the little bastard got the job done?
There are occasional moments of lag, and it doesn't like to resume the movie if you employ the pause function mid-clip, but I'm still impressed that a random piece of shareware out of Germany out-performed the ubiquitous QuickTime. He'll get his recommended donation, which is what I would have spent on gas out to L.A. and back, anyway.
Anybody else have stories of old, antiquated, or simple items putting the newfangled contenders to shame?
Posted by patrick at October 6, 2004 12:35 AM
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