.MOV not play in quicktime 10.6.2 macbook pro WEIRD b/c plays in thumnail in finder

Hello,

I have video issues. This is my first thread on any forum so I don't know if this will work but I have come to a dead end and don't know where to turn for help.

I recently combined home videos using the quicktime sequence where you drop to one video into an open window of the other and quicktime combines them into one longer video. So, this worked fine and the files played fine on my macbook.

But recently I got a new macbook pro version MAC OSX 10.6.2 with 2 GB ram and 320 GB HDD. The strange thing is that .mov movies will not play with Quicktime or iTunes. There is an error message "searching for data file "name of movie and some numbers" then after searching another error message "the movie "name" can not be found. without this file the movie can not properly play." The one final error message "the document "name" could not be opened."

BUT HERE IS THE WEIRD PART: There is a cool aspect of snow leopard...it will show a small thumbnail of the video with a small play button. So when I click the play button the video plays fine in that small thumbnail. But when I click on the video twice to open the file with quicktime or itunes the above mentioned error messages appear! This is something that has got me boggled. Could anyone help?

Same error happens when I try to open .mov files with realplayer.

Also, I can open some of these broken files using VLC and some won't open with VLC. At other times the above error message will appear when I attempt to open the files with VLC.

Also, sometimes, half way through VLC it will crash.

Other movie files like .mp4 play fine with quicktime.

Tried converting using FFmpegx but it does not seem to work.


Will anyone read this? I hope so....


-Devananda

Because QTPro makes a Reference movie when you do the copy and paste like that, it's not totally Self Contained. So when the originals are gone, it has no content to play. When you do a copy and paste like that, you need to do an Export, rather than a Save or Save AS, to make it Self Contained.

Thanks for response

wow! Thanks for telling me that. I guess I made a mistake. I found out about that (using quicktime to combine movies) on a forum and thought it was a quick way to combine movies (instead of using imovie). So I guess those movies are gone because I deleted all the duplicates a long time ago and erased them over and over since! Ha! Well, I definitely learned a lot from your response. Thanks again. I will use imovie from now on when combining movies and I should probably save the originals? Is there any guarantee about using imovie too? Or should I always keep originals? I was just trying to save HDD space and combine files to save space.

Thanks again for the response!

Trouble playing downloaded video clips

Hi - I'm having a similar problem. I'm a novice at video stuff. But now I have to download and view video clips for work. I can't open them in Quicktime and WMV, but they will play as the thumbnail. How do I fix this? Thank you!