Slashdot Mirror
Apple QuickTime DRM Disables Video Editing Apps
An anonymous reader writes "According to numerous posts on Apple's discussion forums (several threads of which have been deleted by Apple), as well as a number of popular video editing blogs, Apple's recent QT 7.4 update does more than just enable iTunes video rentals — it also disables Adobe's professional After Effects video editing software. Attempting to render video files after the update results in a DRM permissions error. Unfortunately, it is not possible to roll back to a previous version of QT without doing a full OSX reinstall. Previous QT updates have also been known to have severe issues with pro video editing apps."
Don't use Quicktime.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
i say we call the AG in every state to complain how Microsoft is disabling other apps with their updates
oh, wait
Yet the apple fans cannot see it.
Without kdawson's helpful comments, I can't make my mind up - was this elitist or egalitarian?
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
You miss the point. Updating quicktime should *not* break adobe.
www.isoHunt.com
Use the recent Dtrace-fix kernel module to get tracing working, and trace the offending program until you find the error. Then write a kenel module to fix that.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Have there been enough examples of Apple bricking things, DRMing stuff and generally being total asshats for us to give up on the "Apple are enlightened, wonderful and friendly to techies" meme yet?
Apple make shiny things for fashion victims. Apple make good UIs. Apple seem to have a better security model than MS.
But it's time to admit that Apple are just as much coprporate MP/RI-AA whores as MS.
We use VLC. Now if the Handbrake folks would get a clue and realize that 0.9.1 fuxxors (I haven't got to use that one for a while) .mkv files and stop blaming it on QT or VLC we'd be happier.
Mac - best damn video editing platform in the world.
Seriously - Apple in my experience pulls posts when their veracity can't be verified. Lord knows they keep plenty of very negative postings on their forums when the bug or whatever issue it is, is a known issue.
I'd stay tuned on this one - Apple has no reason to screw up 3rd party video editors and I certainly wouldn't build a conspiracy theory that its to boost their Video Rentals.
I bet this one is fixed pretty soon. I'll ante $0.25 on the bet.
Renting and watching videos should be enough for anyone
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
Once you install quicktime updates on OSX you can't un-install them without re-installing the OS? WTF is all this hoopla about Windows Containing DRM/WMP11 crap but quicktime being worse? I mean WMP11/Vista DRM doesn't stop you from using Pro tools EVER. WMP11 is about 20 megs of code sitting around that can be replaced with another player.
Being a windows user another thing i can't stand is the stupid Apple Updater. No matter how you tell the program you don't want the f&**(@ installed it tries to update itself any chance it gets even if you just watch a quicktime.
I don't want iTunes, don't want Quicktime, don't want a broken browser and i certainly wouldn't support an OS that meant upgrades to a media player could potentially break your purchased apps functionality with the only recourse being a re-install. Thats so WIN NT 4 which is so TEN YEARS AGO.
Because every video editor has a test system? Not everyone has a non-production machine or the time/resources to test every update. That's Apple's job. And while you can't expect Apple to test compatibility with every OS X app, After Effects is a pretty major video app.
Can't Leopard have Automatic Updating turned on?
Firstly, fair enough not being to uninstall an update to a product, but surely you'd expect to be able to fix the problem by uninstalling QuickTime? Is this problem caused by Apple virtually integrating it into the OS on Macs?
Secondly, I've never been happy with the way Apple seem to always deny issues by removing forum posts. This isn't the first time it's happened. I'd like to see them acknowledging their mistake and issuing a fix, rather than sweeping it under the carpet and pretending it doesn't exist.
I love you man, people like you make my tech support job much easier.
I'm serious.
When I can say "the answer is to restore from your backups".
YOU are the guy that say "ok, cool, just wanted to see if there was a workaround first". YOU are the one that is back in action less than an hour later instead of bitching about how Apple Quality control has gone down the shitter since last year.
Seriously, if I could give you a free computer I would.
It never ceases to amaze me how Apple fanboys are willing to blame everyone but Apple when Apple fucks up something. But oh no, Apple 'just works', and when they 'just stop working', it's always the user's or someone else's fault.
Hello. This is an update to a stable operating system, not some beta kernel module downloaded from Sourceforge.
Quicktime is in fact Mac OS's Audio and Video subsystem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicktime#QuickTime_framework
It's much more likely that updates to the underlying API are what's breaking After Effects etc, than updates to the media player bit.
All the error message says is "You do not have permission to open this file" - you know, like file permissions, like chmod. It could just be that Quicktime has accidentally set the wrong flags on a temporary file.
There are a lot of people very quick to jump on the bandwagon, saying "DRM this" and "Defective By Design that" but I see nothing to suggest this has anything to do with DRM. Even less to suggest this was a deliberate move by Apple. (And even then, the headline "Disables Video Editing Apps" is sensationalist - only one application seems to be affected).
So what remains as fact: Apple have a introduced a bug in an update to a shared library - so what? It's hardly the first time this has happened, on any OS. And maybe not even that - perhaps it's even possible that QuickTime is correct, and the change has just exposed a latent bug in AfterEffects? We just don't have the data to make a judgment, so perhaps everyone could calm down and stop acting like Apple is chained to Hollywood and making the sky fall in.
More the reason to support my argument and then some. We have foreign nations struggling to file suit against MS because of the ties that WMP has into Windows yet your sitting here telling me "QT is more then a media player" that it ties into the subsystem of OSX and once its there, you can't do anything about it except re-install?
Poor design if you ask me and thats a hell of a lot more vendor lockin than what MS does.
I'm not defending MS either, just trying to understand wtf is going on. I was about to give OSX the light of day but it doesn't seem to be any more practical than upgrading to Vista.
They took the two main selling points of a Mac: (1) "it just works", and (2) it being a great platform for creative work, and sacrificed *both* of those things on the altar of DRM.
I think they need to get back to "thinking different".
If you're an individual and not a post production facility, test the upgrade on a separate partition or physical volume.
If you're an individual and not a post production facility, what are the chances of you having an extra Mac lying around to test?
Good point, maybe instead you could perform your software testing on a separate partition or physical volume, or something.
Apple is notorious for stuff like this. They have all sorts of shared components (like QuickTime, FxPlug, etc) that they update independently from each other. I develop for Final Cut Pro and Motion, and the last time I installed a beta for them, they installed a component which broke QuickTime. Now I can't launch the QuickTime player, iTunes, iMovie, or any other app that relies on certain QuickTime codecs, without them crashing immediately. Recent updates to QuickTime haven't fixed the problem either. And of course you can't uninstall anything without reinstalling the OS. Look around - there are plenty of people asking for the "Quicktime deinstaller" which does exist but has its own problems.
Between stuff like this and having to essentially port my code every time they release a new version of OS X, and the constant switching between processor architectures, APIs, UI design requirements, etc. all I can say is it REALLY sucks being a Mac developer.
Full discussion on http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1342677&start=30&tstart=0, which makes the summary quite lame. The fact that subtitles also broke with QT 7.4 does say something though..
I am an environmental modeling software engineer with more than 20 years experience. Let me tell you: You damned well should engineer clean interfaces that can be properly tested. If Apple had done so, this kind of problem would not have occurred. What we are seeing with Apple here (and with DRM in general) is hacking, not engineering.
fwiw.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I would say most of your comment was valid if Adobe and Apple hadn't been in bed together for a long time. After Effects is, in fact, on a large portion of Apple's core user base. The newer users (like myself) are less likely to have it, though some of us do. I know of at least 15 people that have legitimate copies of it and none of them are professional video editors.
The other part of your comment makes sense, but is simply an unrealistic expectation for 95% of end-users. Yes there are people who would know how to use a VM to test new software before upgrading, but the simple fact is, they shouldn't have to. Apple fucked up. Now they should own up to it and simply fix the problem.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Quicktime is Apple's underlying media subsystem. It's not bolted on. The Quicktime Player is bolted on to wrap the functions and play videos. The Quicktime Pro program that they sell enables editing. There is no lock-in, because anyone can provide a media layer, and anyone can access Quicktime. Even Realbasic Apps can bundle Quicktime and do whatever they want. You could write your own media player with it's own DRM and send content to Quicktime (although hackers would grab the unencrypted layer inside of Quicktime).
There should be a way to roll-back the Quicktime update, because the Package should limit changes to the Quicktime Framework and Quicktime Player apps, but I don't know that there isn't Quicktime code everywhere. It should still exist, but it's not a media player, and it's not vendor lockin.
MS gets nailed for Vendor lock-in for bundling not core programs and not letting them be removed. On a Mac, if I don't want Safari, Quicktime Player, iTunes, etc., I just drag the Application to the trash and I never see it again. I still have the underlying OS Components of WebKit (I think that it's an OS Level Framework now) and Quicktime, but I don't have the applications. Microsoft REFUSED to allow the deletion of IE/WMP, and when forced by the courts to provide a version without them, removed the underlying OS components to break Windows.
That's why MS's bundling behavior was problematic, and Apples not so much. Apple lets you remove applications you want without hosing the OS. MS refused to let you remove the application without removing the OS Components, and you NEED media capability even if you don't want WMP, and you NEED the HTML component, because many applications use it once you make it a standard OS Component.
Let's not forget that, at present time, there's no legal way to virtualize OS X in order to this exact type of testing. You can hack it together with an OSX86 install but that defeats the purpose anyways as you're no longer really replicating your original environment.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I bet Apple did engineer proper interfaces for Quicktime, but then a requirement for DRM came along (which is a technical nightmare when you think about it, it's encryption where the person entitled to the content is also the one who must be blocked from accessing it) and Apple was forced to hack up the interface to support it.
Just look at the penalty you pay for on Vista to get all of the DRM. It's insane.
I read the internet for the articles.
This whole "QT" thing bewilders me. I don't know whether to mindlessly flame Apple or KDE...
Apple has extensive testing, and QT is one of the more extensively tested systems. All the major programs are in a test matrix. It doesn't take THAT much effort to do a basic run on say, a dozen or so major apps - an afternoon is all it takes, really.
A minimal test matrix would be a grid with check boxes and comments.
FCP
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
iMovie
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
Premiere
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
After Effects
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
iDVD
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
DVD SP
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
etc. It isn't fucking rocket science, and a single failure on ANY of that is/should be enough to delay the project. I can't imagine someone in QT QA signed off knowing 7.4 would break Adobe AE. While QT does have a prod schedule, it's not like it's tied to NAB like FCP, or the Dev conferences like other apple apps and systems. And it's not like it's some huge number of man hours to fix it. Apple has a software library FILLED to the gunnels with all the minty goodness and this kind of testing is something they do. My guess is someone fucked up and either check AE as working without testing it, or its simply didn't get tested in some imaginary rush to get the latest rev out the door. Either way, some flunky's going to get a lot of heat.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"Windows Media player is garbage in comparison across the board and still has the same type DRM."
You may have a point but, the WMP updates have never borked your Windows system to the point where you need to re-install the OS to get functionality that it broke working again. Funnily enough, "it just works".
Can you see the new Mac/PC commercial?
PC:"Hi. I'm a PC."
MAC:"Hi I'm a Mac I'm a Mac I'm a Mac I'm a Mac"
PC:"Gee Mac, looks like your video is stuck in a loop"
MAC:"I know. I installed an update to Quicktime and now I can't edit videos anymore!"
"But this one goes to 11!"
Looks like most of the issues are fixed by this released today. http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/aftereffects/Adobe_After_Effects_CS3_8_0_2_Read_Me.pdf
Seriously, is there anyone who's surprised at this? I own a MacBook Pro, but I don't have any illusions about Apple not being a bunch of scumbags. I mean, look at their rich tradition of suing rumor sites. Apple is evil, but they make good stuff. I might as well go and buy from another manufacturer, who is evil as well, but then I don't have a cleaner conscience and I don't get to use OS X.
Of course you can build your own computer, but you still support a good bunch of evil companies because someone needs to manufacture the parts you're building with. If you don't want to support evil corporations you need to abandon pretty much everything our society is about.
Yeah, our society is somewhat broken.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)