QuickTime Alternative: A Lean, Mean Replacement for Apple's Multimedia Player Adware and Bloatware Begone Forrest Stroud and Adam Stone
Looking for a simple, low-maintenance, ad-free multimedia player, one that simply plays what you ask it to play and then leaves you alone? With many feeling that the official QuickTime Player from Apple has become overly bloated (24MB download and rising) and overloaded with iTunes and related ads, the (relatively) lean and mean QuickTime Alternative arrives at the perfect time.
QuickTime Alternative makes it possible to play QuickTime files without having to install Apple's QuickTime Player, allowing you to use the player of your choice for multimedia playback (the open source Media Player Classic is included in the 9MB download and is used by default).
QuickTime Alternative is a slim and simple advertising-free application designed to easily play all QuickTime media content, including MOV, QT, and 3GP files as well as streamed multimedia content and QuickTime content embedded in Web pages. Plug-in codecs for Internet Explorer and Netscape/Mozilla are integrated as well.
When paired with KL's Real Alternative player, users will enjoy support for nearly every major multimedia format, including MP3s, MPEGs, AVIs, CD/DVD content, Windows Media (WMVs), RealAudio (RAs and RPMs), and RealMedia (RMs, RAMs, SMILs, and more) files.
We downloaded and installed QuickTime Alternative without any trouble. It did encourage us to first completely remove the existing QuickTime player, which we did without hesitation. After a quick and simple install — there's even a hands-free installation option — the application more than fulfilled its promise. We drove it hard, with each video opening virtually instantaneously and playing smoothly and efficiently.