Avoid The Apple Quicktime Bloat With Qt Lite

It can be annoying when you’re at a website that requires you to install QuickTime to view video content on a webpage. What if you have no desire to install the bloated QuickTime installer from Apple, just to watch a few simple videos? Here we take a look at solving the dilemma by installing QT Lite instead.

The Annoyance – QuickTime

When you get to a page where QuickTime is required you are pointed to the Apple site to download the full version and install everything that comes a long with it.

Sure you will be able to play the video on the website, but you will also get an entire QuickTime Player which you may not need or want.

It also installs the Apple Software Update tool which you don’t need if there is no other Apple products on your machine. Another annoyance worth mentioning about the update tool is “iTunes+QuickTime” is selected by default, so if you were to run an update you would get iTunes even though you don’t want it.

There’s more! It will install a Picture Viewer too…all this just to watch a single video on a website.

It will also decide to start every time you start up your computer… (thanks Apple). So if you happen to have installed it and are sick of seeing it everyday, go into System Configuration and the Startup and uncheck it.

QT Lite

To avoid the extra hassles Apple sends your way, take a look at QT Lite as an alternative. QT Lite only installs the necessary components of QuickTime to watch content embedded on a web page.

When you install QT Lite make sure to select the options to play in all browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome.

Here is a comparison of QuickTime versus QT Lite the Start Menu, notice that QT Lite has fewer components.

QT Lite has all of the same settings and preferences as you would find in the regular QuickTime version for controlling audio and streaming.

After installing, sit back and watch QuickTime videos embedded on a webpage.

We aren’t saying QuickTime is crappy software, it actually works fairly decently, it’s just unnecessary to install everything that comes with the Apple QuickTime installer just to watch videos. Another good choice would be QuickTime Alternative which is the same as QT Lite but also includes Windows Media Player Classic.

Update: It appears that Comodo anti-virus is incorrectly detecting this as a false-positive, but VirusTotal shows that virtually nothing else is detecting it incorrectly.

Download QuickTime Lite

Download QuickTime Alternative