Whenever I play any quicktime movies, whether streaming or from actual files on the hard drive, the sound is garbled and stuttering.

My Hardware:
AMD Athlon 1900 CPU
1 GIG RAM
240 GIGs 7200 RPM Hard drive
Window XP SP1

I have tried the latest Quicktime 7 and the Quicktime alternative v1.65 downloaded from the FreeCodecs
site. Some background:

I have to admit, I have been playing with msconfig, disabling 'unnecessary' services. I turned off both iPodservice.exe and iTunesHelper.exe and I believe that is when I began seeing the problem.

Again, I have completely deleted and reinstalled Quicktime, but still the same results.

Is there, perhaps some Windows registry setting I may have to adjust?

Thanks for all your help from this Newbie who probably shot himself in the foot!

-Gil

I was able to resolve my own problem. First: for whatever reason, whether brought upon myself by fiddling with 'msconfig' or not, I was not able to get Quicktime 7.0.3 to honor my Audio settings. I also have Total Recorder installed on my computer and that program tends to want to default for all playback. From various postings around the 'net, I know that Quicktime does not like that. BUT, I could not get Quicktime to honor the Audio setting directly to my soundcard (Santa Cruz).

What it took was a complete deinstall of Quicktime. I also deleted the preferences file from my Documents & Settings folder.

Then, I reinstalled Quicktime 6.5.1 (under iTunes 4.71 (good thing I saved this file!). This allowed me to regain control of the Audio settings AND honored my request NOT to use DirectSound, but instead, SafeMode WAV form (another tidbit I got from around the 'net). Finally, I had no garbled sound!

Next, I upgraded Quicktime to 7.0.3. But, now I had no sound playing under the SafeMode. So, I sent the Audio to direct to my SantaCruz soundcard and finally have no garbled/stuttering sound.

Good luck to all others who attempt to resolve this problem!

And remember: each change to Quicktime requires a restart of the program (this was a gotcha for me, early in the evening of my troubleshooting).