Recipe to play WMV on Win 7 with QuickTime installed

[Ralf Bitter]

Does anyone have a recipe on how to play WMV videos on Windows
systems with QuickTime installed?

For the live of me I don't get decent playback performance
using HD 720p H.264 QuickTime mov files on Windows (Win 7 in this
case). The stuttering is just unacceptable. MP4 AVC files play
even worse. All my test movies play fine in the QuickTime player
for Windows but not in a stack. Setting the player's "alwaysBuffer"
to false makes no difference.

So, I tried the same test video (same resolution, approximately the
same frame rate) as WMV2 and voilà, the performance is much better,
but there is another problem:
If QuickTime is installed the card's player object stays empty and
start player "myVideo" does nothing, at least in the IDE, even if
the stack includes nothing more than the player. And yes, "dontUseQT"
is set to true before any player or movie related action.

The only way I managed to make the video appear at all means was,
strange enough, to drag any object from the tools palette onto the
card containing the player while the property inspector was visible.
Of course this is no solution but it tells me that there must be a
way to force the player to show the source and therefore to start
playing a WMV in an environment I described above.
By the way, to do without QuickTime is no option as in my case I
need QuickTime to be installed. On the other hand, as I explained,
it seems that I am forced to choose .wmv over .mov.

Any suggestions? Anyone?


Ralf