Apple Quicktime Busts Vistas Buffers

Symptom: You try running Quicktime media player from Apple on your Windows Vista PC and after a few seconds playing, Quicktime chashes and gives you a buffer error.

If this is you, then you are probably running SATA drives using an NVIDIA RAID Driver. If you run Quicktime files from the Internet they work great but any file on your hard drive will crash the Apple player.

Don’t panic, this is normal behavior, albeit, very irritating. The solution is that you need to run the files from either a USB hard drive or an IDE one. At this point neither Apple, Microsoft nor NVIDIA is admitting that there is a problem.

See thread that Apple has on their website.

If I play any files encoded in the MOV file format that are stored LOCALLY on any of my 3 internal SATA HD’s, the file play for a few seconds with sound, but without video, then eventually the buffer overrun error occurs.

If I stream the EXACT SAME file via the internet, or my local home network, or play them from my external USB HD, USB Thumb drive, or even burn them to CD/DVD and play them from that, I do not encounter the buffer overrun problem, and the files play just fine, even the files that are in high definition. I’m not an expert, but in my case, this may point to poor Nvidia SATA drivers, although I could be wrong.

Just to recap. If I play any MOV files from the internal SATA HD’s attached to my motherboard directly, I get a problem. If I stream them, or play them from another storage medium, I do not encounter a problem.