Another broken .mov file -- thanks, Apple, you're a hell of a company -- that ended up being converted to a GIF. My animation based on art by John Parker; explanation of image from my 2001-2007 blog.
August 2017
Grey Grid (Aron Namenwirth) - GIF version
From a quick skim around the WWW, it appears Apple is to blame for old .mov files not working. Apparently they stopped updating Quicktime and forgot to tell anyone and it became a malware haven. Thanks, Apple, you dudes are truly... the genius bar.
Anyway, this means .mov files that I convert to .mp4 don't automatically loop unless I save the .mp4 with a javascript controller. (The old Quicktime had the option to make .mov files loop.) Too much hassle, so for files such as the above, I converted the .mov to .GIF and specified "looping." This destroys one of the subtle charms of the piece, which was that the Quicktime player struggled with a short (.4 seconds) loop and you got erratic repeat times in the above, causing the vertical blue-grey bands to drift from side to side. The browser plays the GIF fairly uniformly. Anyway, too much info. The post explaining the project above is on my 2001-2007 blog.
get a .mov on
My first web video art (2005 - 2009) was posted in the .mov format, I suppose as a concession to the dominance of sleek Apple laptops among the new media crowd.
Suddenly, about a year ago, all those .movs stopped working in Firefox, Chrome and IE. I contacted my conservator, a harried individual who moonlights restoring old broken Cory Arcangel web art, and demanded: "Make these .movs playable!"
Fortunately he had a PC with an older, un-updated version of Quicktime that could be used as a plugin to convert the .mov files to .mp4 (same basic Apple codec, blah blah).
Gradually he is replacing the .movs I posted to the new "friendly" spec (which won't work in five years).
Here's a list of conversions, which will be updated as new ones are added:
"Dancin' (Please Register)" (Quicktime video converted to .mp4) [9.5 MB .mp4 video]
"Exit Maurice" (Quicktime video converted to .mp4) [10.5 MB .mp4]
"Guitar Solo" [4.5 MB .mp4 video]
I have more recently posted .mov files that function adequately -- it's not the filetype that's the problem, per se. Possibly it's only .movs made from 2005-2009 on a Windows machine, converting .avi or .mpg to .mov. My conservator said, "don't even try to understand the twisted minds of your media new media overlords -- just accept that they have killed your work product and .mov on."
"End Notes" [18.8 MB .mp4]
"Sensor Readings" [27 MB .mp4]
"Ninja Elements" [16 MB .mp4]
"Big Rock Grid" [12 MB .mp4]
