question about Quicktime and Windows Media Player

What sort of videos? Have you tried using VLC? It might play them a little smoother.

 

What do you mean by graphic quality? Based on your computer's specifications, I don't see a problem. I find Dell displays to be somewhat blurry which tends to obscure flaws in the source material. The crispness of a Mac display reveals these flaws, especially when viewed fullscreen.

 

From what you list, you should have enough RAM and processor power to handle any reasonable video (the HD trailers at apple.com are the only exception), so I'm not sure why you'd be noticing such a difference, but it would help to know what kind of files you've noticed the problems with.

If the problems are exclusively with .wmv files, then that's an unfortunate fact of life on the Mac--Windows Media Player is an absolute abomination of a piece of software, and despite being a video player it just doesn't play video very well--its scaling algorithms are ugly, it drops frames for no good reason, and is really horrible with video streams--has a tendancy to just stall mid-video for no reason.

Any .avi or .mov should play just fine in QT player, though--particularly under Tiger, video looks quite attractive for the most part. VLC is a good alternative for AVI files, and may produce more attractive video depending on the source. MPlayerOSX uses yet another filter algorithm even though the interface is uglier, so it might be worth a try as well.

One other possibility is gamma issues; Windows has significantly darker default gamma settings than the Mac, and I've noticed a few cases where the brighter image on the mac brings out flaws in the shadows that the darker image on Windows hides. Just a thought.

 

QT Pro won't enhance the quality of the videos. It just enables more functions. You list of filetypes was quite accurate already. I try to avoid Windows Media files as much as I can as they're really bad, especially on a Mac.

 

Flip4mac will enable Quicktime Player to play most wmv files I'm not sure if it improves quality or not as most wmv files I see are crap quality to start with.