10 days ago, Apple’s Developer Connection released a new version of MakeRefMovie, a QuickTime developer tool for generating reference files. It’s released for the latest version of QuickTime. So MakeRefMovie 2.0 can produce QuickTime reference files compatible with up to QuickTime 7.2.

The last version of MakeRefMovie (7.1.5) has a few serious problems. It crashes badly. If you don’t drop a self-contained movie at the right spot, it can easily shut itself down. To this extent, the latest version is stable. We already used it several dozen times, but it has crashed a single time.

It doesn’t look like MakeRefMovie 2.0 hasn’t changed much from the last version. Actually, MakeRefMovie 2.0 has a few small improvements. It has a video preview display. So you can preview your self-contained movie that has been dropped onto the list at the top of the window. Another improvement is a file browser. There is a button that says “Change…” If you click on it, you can designate a file. This is a nice feature because you can use the same settings and then just swap files to make multiple reference movies one by one quickly.

However, we still have problems with QuickTime reference files even with help of MakeRefMovie 2.0. There has been a data rate issue with QuickTime versions beyond 7.1.3. It seems that this problem is non-existent with reference movies that are created with MakeRefMovie 2.0. But there’s an on-going odd problem with QuickTime 7.1.5, 7.16 and 7.2. Our web server is located in California, USA. And some of our European users are not able to view our QuickTime-based tutorial videos through reference files.

Will there be a day when QuickTime is free of bugs? Let’s hope so.

Click on the button to go to Apple Developer Connection/QuickTime Tools



Click on the button for more information on how to use MakeRefMovie

MakeRefMovie is a product of Apple, Inc.