QuickTime Preview 3 expiration: an early warning

QuickTime 5 Preview 3 has officially expired now (on or near April 15, we are unsure of the exact date) but there's no effect for end users - yet. In about a week, QuickTime 5 Preview 3 will present a message on startup to the effect of "Your QuickTime Preview has expired" and then suggest visiting the Web site to obtain a more recent version. Hopefully there will be another release of QuickTime 5 before that happens. As many of our regular readers know, Preview 2 expired somewhat unexpectedly and as a result caused many users significant problems (see one, two, and three) in addition to not being able to view QuickTime media.

One potential problem remains for users who have reverted to version 4.1.2. We believe that when Preview 3 expires, those users may be presented with a dialog at startup to the effect of "SoundManager has expired." This is the same behavior that occured when Preview 2 expired. SoundManager is used by a number of applications, and its expiration will cause problems beyond QuickTime Player itself.

As a precaution, users who utilized the installer to uninstall QuickTime 5 Preview and subsequently installed QuickTime 4.1.2 need to insure that the SoundManager extension is not going to expire also, because the SoundManager extension may not have been changed by reverting to an older version of QuickTime. If you have used a preview release before, and if you have not already done so, manually remove the SoundManager extension and reinstall QuickTime 4.1.2. This will insure there is a "safe" version of the SoundManager extension on your computer.