Quicktime, what gives?

I don’t understand. Why doesn’t Apple just support all of the popular .avi codecs? Or how about .wmv files. Surely they’re not just being childish and pretending it doesn’t exist because it’s a Microsoft format. Does Microsoft somehow prevent them from supporting it? That would be mean.

I know it sounds weird, but unless it’s totally out of Apple’s hands (some weird law?), this lack of functionality is actually offensive to me. Quicktime isn’t a revenue generating product neither directly nor indirectly. I don’t want to believe that this is an intentional move on their part based on principle. At the same time, I don’t believe that the blocker here is the technical implementation.

I love my Mac and for the most part “it just works” exactly as they said it would. But Quicktime is the complete opposite of that … it’s a crippled piece of software. What’s most disappointing is that it’s not even up-front about these shortcomings (imo, “bugs”) when they come up. Instead what happens when I try to play a .wmv file, one of the most popular video formats in the world? A generic error — “Beep boop. Cannot compute. Read more at [generic error url]”. Not everyone knows to just download VLC. If a non technical person sees that error message, chances are that they will think *they* made the error.

Imagine buying a house that comes bundled with a free washer and dryer but after you move in you notice some unexpected behavior: the machines auto-disable themselves whenever you throw in your socks. As it turns out, these machines only support shirts and pants. For everything else like socks, underwear, towels, sheets, etc… you get a generic failure message. Clearly the people who designed the washer aren’t big on socks, which is fine, but they must know that the world runs on them. They must know that millions of people who don’t know the first thing about how washing machines work will try to throw their socks in, only to be treated by the system as if they just did something unreasonable or unexpected.

Anyways, after exploring the neighborhood, you find there are tons of free services that convert your socks into a special material that tricks the machine into thinking they’re pants. But it’s only free for 3 socks at a time. Also, they draw their logo on your socks with a gray Sharpie. A similar service exists for bed sheets except they do house-calls. The only caveat is the sheets always get reduced to 100 thread count, no matter what the original count was. Apparently these are the realities of doing laundry in this new neighborhood.

After about a month of this madness, your niece Suzie who happens to be a realtor stops by for a friendly visit. When you tell her of all the BS you go through to just do simple laundry, her face immediately lights up with a knowing smile and says “brb, I know a guy”. She comes back 5 minutes later with Lan, an independent contractor who offers to completely replace your washer/dryer units with ones that work as expected. All for free. After being lied to and taken advantage of by every single person in this neighborhood’s laundry district, Suzie’s strong recommendation is the only thing that persuades you to take his word for it and also to look past the fact that he’s wearing a traffic cone as a hat.

Apparently all of the insiders in the realty business use Lan’s washers and dryers themselves. Even Tim, the guy who was so sold you the house and talked up the original machines. What was that all about? It’s especially disappointing because it wasn’t something that he innocently forgot to mention. This was an intentional lie by omission. He does this all the time to new home buyers. Most people aren’t lucky enough to have a savvy niece to point out Tim’s deception. Some of them have been assimilated, but most have simply accepted defeat and adapted to the circumstances. They love their house so they have given Tim the benefit of the doubt on the laundry issue. After all, he represents one of the richest, most high-tech, and innovative companies in the history of the world. If it was possible to wash socks in a house such as this, they would have of course done it already.

Anyways now you know, and you can finally fire the bed sheets crew. You’re still pretty sure that they replaced your cable box with a slower, bulkier, ad-ridden Comhoo branded one.