0Updating QT Lite & QuickTime alternative

I’ve long been a user of Quick­Time Altern­at­ive, as a much light­er altern­at­ive to the full Apple Quick­Time.  Sadly QT Altern­at­ive (and its cous­in QT Lite) has­n’t been updated in over a year, whilst Quick­Time has received sev­er­al secur­ity and bug fixes.  Updat­ing QT Lite is a straight­for­ward pro­cess which I will detail below.  I have also built an updated installer which is avail­able on the [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads page[/intlink].  This installer is based on Apple Quick­Time 7.7.3 (28-Dec-2012)

First, a quick note — QT Lite and Quick­Time altern­at­ive are the same thing — the only dif­fer­ence being that Quick­Time Altern­at­ive includes Media Play­er Clas­sic.  Both ver­sions are based on Quick­Time 7.6.9.  I would sug­gest avoid­ing Quick­Time Altern­at­ive, and instead, installing an up-to-date ver­sion of Media Play­er Clas­sic — Home Cinema, which you can find linked from the down­loads page.

The files installed by QT Lite are dir­ectly from the Quick­Time installer.  They can be extrac­ted, and copied over the top of the files installed by QT Lite to update to the latest ver­sion.  Below I will list the pro­ced­ure for extrac­tion and the files required for any­one that wishes to com­plete the update manu­ally (rather than using the new installer).  Please also note that I haven’t found a way to extract the browser plu­gins without actu­ally installing Quick­Time — but I don’t recom­mend installing the browser plu­gin any­way.  If you do want to install the browser plu­gin then see the sec­tion at the bot­tom of this article.

The easy way — my updated installer

Down­load from the down­loads page

The manual way — 1. extracting the files from Quick Time

1. Down­load the Quick­Time installer from Apple
2. Down­load the QT Lite installer from File­Hippo
3. Extract the Quick­Time installer files from the down­loaded file with Win­RAR, or by run­ning QuicktimeInstaller.exe /extract
4. Use lessM­SI to extract quicktime.msi to a new folder
5. Browse to the new folder — you should see 1 msi file and 2 folders
6. Browse to c:\program files\quicktime (c:\program files (x86)\quicktime on x64 systems)
7. The “QTSys­tem” folder con­tains all the files you need — copy it to some­where (e.g. your doc­u­ments folder)

The manual way — 2. Browser plugins [optional step]

• Unin­stall any pre­vi­ous ver­sions of quick­time or quick­time lite
• Run the stand­ard quick­time installer and install quicktime
• Browse to c:\program files\quicktime (c:\program files (x86)\quicktime on x64 systems)
• The “plu­gins” folder con­tains all the files you need — copy it to some­where (e.g. your doc­u­ments folder)
• Unin­stall quick­time, applic­a­tion sup­port, and apple soft­ware update from the con­trol panel

The manual way — 3. Installing and updating QTLite

• Install QTL­ite
• Copy the QTSys­tem folder you cop­ies earli­er into c:\program files\QT Lite
• When you’re asked about mer­ging and over-writ­ing, say yes

The manual way — 4. Updating browser plugins [optional step]

• If you do want browser plu­gins, and you copied them from quick­time earli­er then read on
• Copy the “Plu­gins” folder you copied earlier
• For Fire­fox copy it to c:\program files\mozilla fire­fox and say yes to any mer­ging/over-writ­ing
• For Chrome copy it to c:\program files\google\chrome and say yes to any mer­ging/over-writ­ing
• There are prob­ably sim­il­ar steps for oth­er browsers, but I haven’t checked them yet.

How I made the installer

1. Extract the files as detailed in steps 1 and 3 above
2. Extract the QTL­ite installer with “Uni­ver­sal Extract­or” (a ver­sion of UE with up-to-date pre­requis­ites can be obtained from ajuaOn­line)
3. Also install InnoSetup (the uni­code ver­sion) — we’ll need it
4. Over-write the files in the {app}\QTSystem folder with the ones saved earlier
5. Over-write the files in the {app}\Plugins folder with the ones saved earli­er (some renam­ing and duplic­at­ing is required, this should be obvious)
6. Copy the files from plu­gins to vari­ous oth­er loc­a­tions (lots of them)
7. Remove the “check” part of lines 631 and 632