10.6.1 & Flip4Mac

[nza]

Hey guys,

Ever since installing Snow Leopard, I've had an issue with Flip4Mac.

This window pops up at random times throughout the day, slows my entire computer, the fans kick up, and all 3 of my external hard drives go nuts. It happens completely randomly, it happened earlier while I was simply browsing these forums. The status bar gets to about 50% then disappears.. at which point nothing happens. If it's loading a movie file, it never plays it. I don't know what it's doing.

Any help? I've already uninstalled Flip4Mac and it's STILL happening.. there's no trace of Flip4Mac on my computer from what I can find, but it's still doing this.

Any help would be appreciated.

If this is the wrong forum, my apologies. Thanks guys!!

 

[VanNess]

First of all, make sure and run the uninstaller that came with F4M. It should be located in the Flip4Mac folder in your applications folder. After running the uninstaller, restart your computer - just in case.

Then download and install the so-called beta version of F4M located here. The beta version is the only version compatible with Snow Leopard. If you use Quicktime X (as opposed to Quicktime 7) and want to play wmv files locally in QTX, open the Flip4Mac preference pane in system preferences, click the player tab, then the advanced tab. Add QTX to the list of applications that Flip4Mac will load the entire WMV file (as opposed to steaming the file, which is, and has always been, dog slow using Flip4Mac).

Frankly, Flip4Mac looked promising when it first came out, but it's been downhill development-wise for a few years now. Still no support in sight for iMovie 08, or now, 09. Following the thread regarding snow leopard computability on their support forums, the tech seemed to be completely unfamiliar with QTX when snow leopard was released; certainly never tested it with F4M despite the fact that developer previews had been around for almost a year.

The good news is that, alternatively, you can use VLC (free) for local playback of wmv files. It seems to handle most, if not all of the wmv content that Flip4Mac handles and the current version of VLC handles them far better than Flip4Mac ever did. Not waiting to load large wmv files, no turtle-like streaming. It plays everything instantly.

You'll still need Flip4Mac's browser plugin for content over the internet. For that, there is no alternative.

 

[psxguru]

I bet the reason you're seeing that progress dialogue is that you have a finder window open on a bunch of movie files and it's set to display in list/column or coverflow mode. If it's in one of these modes, thumbnail/previews are generated for any supported files. So any .wmv files are being processed via flip4mac hence the progress bar popping up.