QuickTime capabilities question (naive response)

[Cteno4 at aol.com]

One thing to think about including the quicktime installer is the Apple 
legal stuff. They force you to have your product only use the most 
current version of quicktime (ie if someone has an older version your 
product should not run with it, but force the installation of the newer 
version of quicktime. Also if you do another pressing of your disc at a 
later date and there is a new version of quicktime you use to have to 
redo the installer (and of course the testing and compatibility questions 
come up) for the second pressing. While you can probably skirt under 
apple's radar on this sometimes, they do have you sign your life away 
with the agreements on all of this.

Its understandable that they want to foster as much updating of quicktime 
technology installed out there as possible, but this does cause problems 
with schools and other situations that have very frozen operating system 
levels or installation restricitions. Almost all the stuff i do with 
quicktime works fine with versions 2 or 3 back, so i can hadle older 
systems w/o forcing them to upgrade the qt and the hastles that might 
come along with that. its worse on the pc end since some authoring 
systems required a dll only present in one version of quicktime to work. 
it created a sitiuation where you had to install the older version of qt 
then install the newer version just to get the one old needed dll from 
the older qt...

also if you have your own installer on a cd (for anything) it must also 
activate the quicktime installer app if that version of qt is not present.

i love apple and quicktime, but these installation issues makes smaller 
projects a real hastle since the extra work to utilize the quicktime 
installer and the restrictions it puts on users usually causes us to just 
require the user download or install some sort of quicktime (within 
versions we know works). the testing of installers is a pain, since to do 
it right you have to have clean systems each time you do it and that 
takes work setting up or going to a testing house to have done. these 
days broadband is around enough to usually say its ok to pass that onto 
your users if its not a big budget project that can hadle the load.

cheers,

jeff

use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote on 5/23/04 12:00 PM

>From: Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
>Subject: Re: QuickTime capabilities question (naive response)
>To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
>Message-ID: <40AF7B51.1080702 at fourthworld.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>
>Mark Talluto wrote:
>> On May 21, 2004, at 10:17 PM, Erik Hansen wrote:
>>> is there any way to automate the whole deal
>>> and put it in a button "Install Me!"
>>> along the lines of Alice in the Looking Glass?
>> 
>> You can put the whole installer into a custom property and spit it out, 
>> run the installer, and delete it when it is all over.  I have done this 
>> a few times for installing fonts.
>
>An excellent suggestion.
>
>Also, most installers allow you to launch other installers as part of 
>the installation sequence.  So even if just another file on the CD, it's 
>fairly common for the QT installer to be piggy-backed this way as just 
>another step in the installation.



Jeffrey H. Reynolds
6620 Michaels Dr.
Bethesda, MD  20817

301.469.8562

email: cteno4 at earthlink.net
       cteno4 at aol.com