I have been forced to move from an older MacBook Pro (that was nevertheless running the latest mac OS) to a new one. I successfully imported all my apps and data, and now I am just trying to fix the few remaining problems.
Of these is the QuickTime plugin in DEVONthink. I have a lot of web archives containing an audio clip saved in DT. These used the QuickTime plugin to display the player’s GUI. This is all gone now. The audio clips still play, but all at the same time and I can’t control them since there is no GUI.
Where does DEVONthink pull the QuickTime plugin from, when there is one on the system? Is it simply the one in Safari, even if disabled there? Do I need to do something special to re-enable the QT plugin in DEVONthink? I understand that QuickTime and its plugin are meant to disappear soon, but in the meantime, I would like to be able to use my archives again.
DEVONthink doesn’t use or load Internet plug-ins on its own, this is handled by the WebKit framework of macOS.
By default plug-ins should be still loaded from the folders ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins, /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and /System/Library/Internet Plug-Ins. The QuickTime Plugin e.g. is located on my machine in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Disabled (and it was obviously disabled by macOS).
But Apple already announced that this won’t be supported anymore in the future and therefore I would highly suggest a different way of archiving such data.
Thank you. I had completely forgotten about this Disabled Internet Plugins folder. It has been a while since the last time I had to pull back the QuickTime plugin out of it.
Re: Moving to a different way of archiving such data… Other than what? DEVONthink’s own web archive clips? I had just been clipping from a web site, in one of the formats proposed by DEVONthink. To be honest, I had not thought much until now about the fact that this capture format is inherently fragile for archival, because of this plugin & extension dependencies.
In case of multimedia I would suggest to directly download the files if possible (depends on the website, the used browser and might require extensions) and to add them to DEVONthink.
This format was introduced by Safari and it’s not very useful for dynamic websites or websites including multimedia. In addition, it’s limited to Apple platforms.
Obviously, this solution is only convenient if all one wants is one particular multimedia piece in the whole web page. There are, however, situations where it is convenient to keep the various pieces together, rather than as a dust of multimedia pieces dumped in a folder. The web archive seemed to serve that purpose, but now I understand that I am going to need to think of a replacement solution and format transfer strategy.
Actually, I think that it was useful for such content, considering the alternatives (a flat pdf?). Being limited to Apple platforms is not an issue for me, as I don’t share my clippings.