The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I’m sure many people who use Firefox have noticed this happening since they upgraded their Quicktime over a year ago. It is quite an annoying occurrence and happens almost always when you go somewhere such as Apple.Com and try to watch movie trailers or pretty much any other site that uses embedded Quicktime videos.

Since this issue has been occurring for a long time for me and many others I decided to look into it some using Mozilla’s Bug tracking tool. If you search for “quicktime” in their bug database for Firefox you will locate these results. According to many of the bugs listed there the corruption is actually heap corruption coming from the Quicktime plugin, the issue is that Firefox is not properly handling the corrupted data and instead of ignoring it or gracefully failing out it is crashing to the desktop (and in some cases causing a reboot of the machine entirely!).

Given that this bug has been around for a long time I figured that it would have been fixed by the Firefox team a while back, but it turns out it may not have been their issue after all.

Another search of the internet for any workarounds yielded a topic on NVIDIA Driver Issues crashing Quicktime. So, it is possible that the issue is tied to graphics cards as well and not just Quicktime itself or Firefox’s handling of plugin crashes. Following some links from that topic yielded this one about a possible workaround. See post #7 in that topic.  However that workaround was only necessary until the newest version of Quicktime came out (see my comments below).

THE FIX:

After reading through the forums I linked to above, the thing that seemed to fix it for everyone was when Apple released Quicktime 7.3.1 a couple of months ago. I apparently did not have the latest version on this computer (which has a Geforce 7300GT card installed!). After installing the newest version of quicktime I can confirm that movies now play properly in Firefox without crashing!

You can install the latest version of Quicktime from here.  They even have the option of getting it without iTunes now - for a while they forced you to download iTunes as well which was rather annoying.  Hope that helps anyone who finds this blog entry!  Finally a problem I have had for over a year now is resolved!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!