Macintosh users have grown fond of inits and extensions added to their systems. These are the icons that appear at the bottom of your screen while your machine is booting. Some examples are: screen savers, sound controllers, alarms and other added tools or background programs. While these are fun to use, they may take vital time away from your system that is needed for QuickTime. If you are having problems with the speed of playback of your movies, perhaps you should see which inits you can remove from your startup process.
Another init of concern is ΓÇ£Speedy CDΓÇ¥ from Shirt Pocket Software. While this program is nice for CDs with thousands of files on them, it actually slowed down the machines reading of the CD-ROM media in our tests. This may make your movies run very choppy and is not recommended for use with QuickTime based CDs.
A note to Macintosh II and Macintosh LC users...
In our tests, some Macintosh II and Macintosh LC machines experience an occasional pause in the video and audio, especially when the movie is first starting to play. This is NOT a problem with your CD, rather its a symptom that can be caused by many things. There are several things that you can do to resolve this problem.
First, pull down the Chooser from the Apple menu and turn AppleTalk Inactive. AppleTalk takes up background processing time. Although this will not affect most applications, it has an ever so slight effect on QuickTime movie playback.
Second, we are pushing the envelope of Mac performance to its edge with the Mac II and LC, thus ANY inits in the system outside of the CD-ROM drivers could be slowing the system down. CLEAN OUT YOUR SYSTEM FOLDER!, or at least use an init manager to turn everything off before you run this CD.
If your System Folder is clean and you still experience these problems, it might be that you have one of the few extremely slow CD-ROM players on the market. There are a couple of really cheap players out there which just don't perform as well as the Apple CDSC (unfortunately, we can't mention any names for obvious reasons). Also, contact your CD-ROM manufacturer and ask about ROM updates that might increase the performance of your player. Several vendors are doing this now.
Please stay tuned to one of our future re-releases of the movie (send in those warranty cards!). As time goes on, quality and performance of QuickTime will increase, and we will update each of our movies on CD-ROM to take advantage of these performance increases.
