When Apple announced that it wasn’t going to fix a couple of known vulnerabilities in Quicktime for Windows, it didn’t take long for companies to issue alerts to users. It’s straightforward: if you have Quicktime on your Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows 8 or Windows 10 system, you need to remove it. ASAP. Here’s how…
It’s not often that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warns people to remove software from one of the largest companies in the world, but that’s just what happened when DHS issued a press release strongly encouraging all Windows users to ensure that they’ve removed Apple’s Quicktime player and software from their system. Even if you never use it anyway. For real. Here’s the release: Apple Ends Support for Quicktime for Windows.
Want a tool that can play videos of various formats? VLC is a far better choice and supports way more formats anyway, from MK4 to AVI to MP4 to MOV. And it’s free. Download your own copy at videolan.org. And there’s a little thing called Windows Media Player, which is still kinda/sorta part of Windows 10, as I explain: What happened to Windows Media Player on Win10?
Alternatives are easy. What’s important is that you delete Quicktime from your PC immediately. Better safe than, well, you know…
To start, just go to your Start Menu and look under all apps for Quicktime (or the equivalent if you’re in Win 7, Win 8, etc).
On my Windows 10 system, I do indeed have the software installed:
I can launch QuickTime and it doesn’t have any warnings or information about what to do. In fact, it acts as if there’s no issue whatsoever:
But we know better. You’ll notice that there’s an “Uninstall QuickTime” option, but Apple actually recommends that you go through the standard Windows app removal process, so instead of choosing Uninstall QuickTime, go to Settings on the menu, then choose System and Apps & features on the left side, to get here:
Notice that I have all my apps sorting by size (middle of the three boxes on the right side). To save your sanity, change that to Sort by name, then scroll down to find “Q”:
There it is! A click on “QuickTime 7” in this window and it offers up the option I seek:
As you may suspect, a click on “Uninstall” moves us to the next step…
Well, yeah, that’s kinda the point of this exercise!
Click on “Uninstall” and you’re just about done. Just one more confirmation:
Glad to see this message and yes, you betcha, uh huh, you want to click “Yes” and get rid of QuickTime from your Microsoft Windows PC.
And you’re done. That’s it.
Phew!
I use Media Jukebox 14 for my audio files. After uninstalling QuickTime 7 from my Windows 7 PC, Media Jukebox will no longer play m4a audio files. The message says QuickTime must be installed to play the file. I love Media Jukebox and want it to be my audio player. How do I fix this?
I’m a public-radio broadcaster. Nearly every public radio station that is a member of the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) program distribution service MUST have QuickTime in order to upload their programs to PRX’s online distribution network.
PRX’s audio encoder, which converts .WAV and .AIFF audio files into MP2 files — the public-radio audio standard — cannot function without QuickTime.
I’ve alerted PRX of this ongoing threat to QuickTime, but it will be quite some time before a new encoder that doesn’t require QuickTime will be available. Until then, we’re stuck. Is there any way for PCMatic to come up with a hotfix for QuickTime, since Apple no longer supports it?
why not go to control panel and unistall Quick time 7. that’s what i did.
When I went to Settings & then Apps & features, I did not have quicktime, but now I have a question.
I have 9 listings of Microsoft Visual C for different dates & years. Is that normal, or is something wrong?
i can tell you that’s normal. when the windows update service downloads and installs a new version of visual c, it’s not replacing the old ones but adding to the original. kind of like how a patch file is implemented.