Why Mavericks' movies may not preview properly
Reader Arlen Andrews has a concern about his movie files. He writes:
I recently upgraded to Mavericks and now when I attempt to preview a movie file I see only a window telling me that the movie is zero KB in size, which I know isn’t true. When I double-click on the movie, it opens in QuickTime Player X but then immediately converts. What’s going on?
This appears to be another under-the-hood change designed so that the Mac OS better mimics the iOS. If you have one, find a movie file that ends with .m4v. Dollars-to-doughnuts, if you select that file and press the space bar, Quick Look will behave exactly as it should and show you the movie. Now try it again with one of your .mov files. No dice, right?
Right. And that’s because Mavericks is very particular about the kinds of movie codecs it allows. For example, I created a movie with Telestream’s Screenflow 4 and exported it using the application’s Lossless format (which uses the Animation codec by default). When I attempted to preview the resulting movie with Quick Look I saw exactly what you did—a seemingly empty document. When I double-clicked on it, QuickTime Player X launched, up popped a conversion window, and I had to wait for that conversion to complete before I could view the movie. (And now I had two copies of the movie—the original Animation-codec version and the converted version that used the Apple ProRes 4444 codec.)
However, movies using H.264 encoding previewed perfectly and opened in QuickTime Player without requiring conversion.
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