QuickTime Plug-In Playback Jittery At Times

Symptom:

You have a page with a QuickTime plug-in using JavaScript with the AUTOPLAY and LOOP parameter set to TRUE and you are trying to view QuickTime movie embedded in the web browser on Safari (or any other browser). At times the movie plays back very jittery, but if you manually press the stop button and play button on the embedded QuickTime player, the jitteryness goes away completely (in my case we are sending AVI movies to it.)

You know there is nothing wrong with the movie file that was on the server because if you save the movie locally from the plug-in or make a copy of the file directly from the server and play it back it plays back normally.

Root Cause:

It appears that this problem occurs in the following manner:

• The web server starts to send part of the movie
• The QuickTime Plug-In starts to play any playable part
• But the play head catches up with the download
• The playing become jittery after that even even in the subsequent looping of the movie clip

Workaround Fix

In our case, we are not sending sound so we activated another QuickTime Plug-In parameter PLAYEVERYFRAME to TRUE. This may not completely fix your problem, however, at least by giving this a try, and the movie would play smoothly after it downloads all the frames then you know you have the exact problem as I had.

Comment

It appears that the reason this happens is that the plug-in will auto-adjust the play-back skip rate to preserve the audio playback sampling rate. Another way to try this is to set AUTOPLAY to off and try to play at different wait time (from almost no buffering to buffered full) and see you can duplicate this on your specific situation. This problem was worst when running on the Mac Safari on my MacBook Pro 17-in and lest on Microsoft Windows IE 7 under Windows XP. Also when the web server and video generation was on a very fast server this did not occur, but on a slower server this occurred more frequently.

Reference

Look in the latest Apple QuickTime Plug-In documentation (Google for) QTScripting_HTML.pdf for more information.

Time Took To Fix This

It took about 6 hours of time in front of the computer, visits to my customer site at night to qualify what is going on.