Window Users: Lose Quicktime Now!

The Problem:

This from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security: The Zero Day Initiative has issued advisories for two vulnerabilities found in QuickTime for Windows (read the full report here).

What this boils down to is this: if you are working on a PC, you need to uninstall the Quicktime video player from your machine now. Apple has dropped it. They never made new versions or supported Quicktime for Windows 8 or 10. And they released their last security update in January (2016). Since then, Trend Micro has discovered two bugs in the software and Apple is not going to fix them. By April 15, Apple had still not officially announced giving up on Quicktime, but evidently has confirmed that its dead, as of 24 hours ago. They confirmed it, but they haven’t actually done anything more to help their Windows customers. In fact, they still offer it!

For many Windows users, this won’t be such a big deal. You probably uninstalled Quicktime a long time ago. But if you fall into one of these two groups, it could be a headache for you…

User #1: The Passive “Personal Computer” Person

If you refer to it as your “personal computer”, I’m guessing that you still have Quicktime installed, even if you don’t use it or have any idea what it even is. This is a risky practice. Any time there is software on your machine that does not receive regular security updates from the developer, you are making it machine vulnerable to attacks, or what DHS describes as, “elevated cybersecurity dangers, such as increased risks of malicious attacks or electronic data loss.” The only mitigation is to completely uninstall Quicktime—whether you use it or not. If you aren’t sure how to do that, I can help.

User #2: The Heavy Adobe Person

Some Adobe products rely on the Quicktime platform for certain functions. Namely the ProRes video codec, which requires Quicktime to be installed. This was Adobe’s response to the problem:

Adobe has worked extensively on removing dependencies on QuickTime in its professional video, audio and digital imaging applications and native decoding of many .mov formats is available today (including uncompressed, DV, IMX, MPEG2, XDCAM, h264, JPEG, DNxHD, DNxHR, ProRes, AVCI and Cineform). Native export support is also possible for DV and Cineform in .mov wrappers.

Unfortunately, there are some codecs which remain dependent on QuickTime being installed on Windows, most notably Apple ProRes. We know how common this format is in many worfklows, and we continue to work hard to improve this situation, but have no estimated timeframe for native decode currently.

Other commonly used QuickTime formats which would be affected by the uninstallation of QuickTime include Animation (import and export), DNxHD/HR (export) as would workflows where growing QuickTime files are being used (although we strongly advise using MXF for this wherever possible).

So if you use After Effects, Photoshop or Premiere, you may be using Quicktime as a backend platform for certain projects. Adobe seems to be working to update its software so as not to rely on Quicktime, but you should go ahead and uninstall it now.

The Bottom Line:

It isn’t hard to do this. Apple has made a page available to Windows users which walks you through the process. And I’m more than happy to help out, as well. But please make sure to do this on any Windows machines you work on. Leaving Quicktime installed is leaving the front door wide open to unwanted visitors.