Troubleshooting Mac OS X 10.3: Agfa scanners; MPEG files with no video

Agfa scanners no longer compatible We have received reports from several readers that their Agfa scanners do not work using the official Agfa software under OS X 10.3. Reader Kevin Lenahan received the following email message from Agfa's customer support:

"Agfa scanners are not Mac OS X v.10.3 compatible. Agfa left the consumer scanner market at the end of 2001, about the same time as the original OS X was introduced, and when they did all ongoing development and support for their products ceased. While OS X software (i.e., FotoLook 3.6X) was released then, Apple's latest revision of OS X to 10.3 is apparently no longer compatible with it and without this the scanners will never work correctly, if at all."

However, despite Agfa's dire pronouncement, Kevin reports that the third-party scanner driver VueScan appears to work with his scanner after a quick test.

MPEG files not playing video Reader Stephen Reiss has been experiencing a problem since upgrading to Panther where MPEG (.mpg) files would not provide video when played back using QuickTime (both in QuickTime Player and from within any other application which uses QuickTime for MPEG support).

After much testing, Stephen found that the culprit was the presence of the empty folder ~/Library/QuickTime (inside the personal Library folder inside your home directory). After deleting that folder, the problem disappeared, and the folder was not recreated. (Note: the folder is generally not created by default, but can be created by a user, or by a software installer, for installing QuickTime plug-ins that only affect the user in question. It's possible that in this case the folder wasn't truly empty, but had an invisible file that was causing a problem.)

Resources

VueScan

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