Vista, iTunes and ReadyBoost do not play well
I am not talking about the flaws that were present in iTunes 7 under Vista. With version 7.1 Apple fixed most of the problems there were present in iTunes, I do not guarantee that all of them were fixed but iTunes is now at least, usable under Vista, including music store purchases. Videos are another story entirely.
ReadyBoost is a technology in Vista that promises to speed up your system performance by making use of a flash drive to cache data to and retrieve information from it more rapidly than always relying on the hard drive to do so.
When playing back a video in iTunes under Vista I noticed yet another problem that someone needs to address. This, I believe should be Apple’s responsibility. Video and audio will skip and stutter when playing back a movie or video clip in iTunes under Vista with a ReadyBoost drive plugged in. I could only venture a guess at the reason which may or may not be right but the truth is I don’t really know.
In fact almost no one is aware of this problem. I did find one mention of this in a forum which got all of one or two lines in the entire thread. This I think is rather sad as it is a real problem and it needs to be addressed if not by Apple by Microsoft.
The only solution for the problem is to unplug your ReadyBoost drive, close and restart iTunes and then play back your video normally. I have replicated this no less than 30 times on my laptop with a ReadyBoost drive plugged in. Unplugging the drive never fails to fix the problem and plugging it in never fails to cause the problem.
One could only hope that Microsoft or Apple is hard at work on a fix for this problem but I’m certainly not going to hold my breath.
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April 16th, 2007
A similar sort of problem exists with SATA hard drives, apparently. In my case it only affects videos. Audio is fine.
I cannot play an iTunes Store-bought video on the SATA hard drive in Vista, but can copy the same video on a thumb drive and it’ll play just fine. I didn’t discover that, by the way. Picked it up from someone on Apple’s discussion board, where it was said Apple is aware, but I’ve seen no acknowledgment from Apple.
Cheers from Phoenix, Arizona, USA
April 16th, 2007
Thanks for the heads up Steve. It seems Apple has a few more problems with iTunes than they would like to admit. I don’t expect them to fix it for Windows but you can be guaranteed it will work flawlessly on OSX.
April 18th, 2007
You need to apply the KB932649 patch from MS. This is not just a QuickTime issue.
April 18th, 2007
It was a good suggestion but it didn’t help, if anything it made things worse with the drive plugged in. As long as I unplug the ReadyBoost drive, everything is fine. In some way, this problem is related to ReadyBoost, why, I do not know.
April 22nd, 2007
I’m having hard time imagining a way to make this kind of bug on the application level, when the speed of disk access using application level APIs should be *faster* and the new technology transparent.
Shouldn’t Vista be compatible with previous software? How can a software that works fine on W2000 and XP have this kind of problems with Vista?
April 22nd, 2007
Yes, that’s how it’s SUPPOSED to work. But what actually happens is well, not that. Here’s my theory, iTunes is trying to cache the video to the flash drive (don’t ask me why) but is using it as a regular hard drive, data cannot be written to a flash drive in the same way. It’s a stretch, I know but that’s the best I can come up with given the circumstances. It works fine as long as the ReadyBoost drive isn’t plugged in.
As for your second question, most of it does, Office XP doesn’t work though and a number of anti-virus and firewall software do not run on Vista (those that were designed for XP).
April 22nd, 2007
[...] Today, cruising my feeds I saw an interesting item from the aforementioned Omar Shahine pointing me to Vista.Blorge, a site that describes how iTunes and Vista’s ReadyBoost don’t play well with each other. Sure enough after removing the SD card I’m using for ReadyBoost, I was able to watch the video with no issues via iTunes. I’ve replicated this at least several times now on both the Lenovo X60 and the Asus R2H. I don’t see the issue that the author Jonathon Schlaffer has with music playback in iTunes, only with video, but I’m guessing this is has to do with the still relatively confusing ReadyBoost voodoo and the devices you choose to run it. [...]
April 27th, 2007
iTunes on Windows sucks, period. And I’m having a hard time believing it’s all Microsoft’s fault. iTunes/Quicktime does some very inefficient things with disk access, video drawing, etc. — My 3.2GHz dual-core machine can’t even play the 1080 HD videos without massive stuttering. There’s something wrong there.
http://www.pdsys.org/blog/2006/12/17/IBoughtAZuneByeByeIPod.aspx
http://www.pdsys.org/blog/2006/12/02/iTunes7WindowsXPAndVistaAndTerribleDiskPerformance.aspx
April 27th, 2007
Yes, iTunes is and will always be optimized for use on Mac OSX. Apple will not provide the best support for iTunes on Windows, it’ll work, barely and with problems. If you want iTunes to work correctly then Apple suggests you buy a Mac. I’m on my way… at least for a laptop anyway.
I can’t believe that Apple really cares about providing support for iTunes to Windows users and it is doubtful they will listen to anything. iTunes 6 was a great program… what happened between versions 6 and version 7 that turned it into a slow, broken, zombie.
April 28th, 2007
[...] I don’t even bother with ReadyBoost on my desktop because it’s so fast that I see NO improvement by using ReadyBoost on it. Then there are some problems you have to learn to deal with if you choose to enter the world of ReadyBoost and may require you to unplug the drive for short periods of time. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
June 7th, 2007
Buy a Mac for I-Tunes? I love my I-Pod I have hated I-Tunes since the day it came out. I wish that napster worked with the I-Pod because it is still my favorite. A different music service that sync’s with my I-Pod seems like less expesive solution.
June 13th, 2007
This is a problem with both QuickTime I/O and Vista disk stack which is exposed when using ReadyBoost. The hotfix kb932094 fixes the problem for now.
July 8th, 2007
I am so glad I ws able to find this discussion group. I just purchased the iPhone and a new PC, downloaded the necessary programs and it worked fine. But once I downloaded videos from itunes, I started having problems with the playback. After reading previous comments from others, I am under the impression that Apple will not do anything to fix this issue for PC users. Now I feel screwed. Does anyone have any suggestions besides “go and buy a MAC?”
February 22nd, 2008
i just bought my first computer. i’m 40, so it was a long time in coming. i bought a laptop. cost me $1,000. a lot of money to me. i was all set to listen to music from you tube. RIGHT! only a few seconds at a time will play, then stop, then play.
WHAT THE F*** ! i feel screwed, too!