Run QuickTime Player 7 in Mac OS X Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks

QuickTime Player, the video player and editing tool bundled with the Mac for ages, received a fairly major overhaul when it turned into QuickTime Player X. While it became free and lost the need to upgrade to a Pro version, it also lost out on a lot of really nice professional features that QuickTime Player 7 had. Perhaps most missed from QuickTime Player 7 is the excellent A/V tools panel, which allows users to adjust the video brightness, color, contrast, tint, playback speed, audio volume, audio balance, bass, treble, pitch shift, and playback.

Fortunately, for Mac users running any somewhat modern version of Mac OS X, whether it’s Snow Leopard, OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, OS X Mavericks, and even OS X Yosemite, OS X El Capitan, or macOS Sierra (!), you can actually still install and run the older QuickTime Player 7 client, and have it sit right alongside QuickTime Player X without incident.

Additionally, if you happened to have bought QuickTime Player Pro some time ago, the app still accepts those Pro registration numbers, and is then able to use all of the excellent editing, trimming, and exporting features that modern versions of QuickTime Player would greatly benefit from. Even if you didn’t go Pro years ago, you still may benefit from some of the added abilities that the older version of the app.

How to Download & Run Old QuickTime Pro on New Macs

If you’re interested in this, getting the old version of QuickTime Player in new versions of Mac OS X is really easy:

1. Download and install QuickTime Player 7, you can get it here directly from Apple Support (technically it’s version 7.6.6)



2. Open up /Applications/Utilities/ to find “QuickTime Player 7” – it installs separately from QuickTime Player X and does not conflict with the new version at all

Go ahead and launch the QuickTime Player 7 app, you can even run it alongside QuickTime Player X if you want to. For those familiar with the older version, you’ll instantly know and appreciate the differences, though to unlock it’s full potential you really need the Pro version.

My personal favorite aspect of version 7 is the AV panel, accessible from the Window menu by selecting “A/V Controls”. It’s a lot like the adjustment tools that are built into the Preview image editor in OS X, but obviously they’re for video instead, allowing you to make viewing and sound edits without any complexity at all.

In some ways, using QuickTime Player 7 is actually easier to use than iMovie for making simple movie edits and adjustments to videos, which makes it disappointing to have lost many of the 7 features in the transition of the app to version X. Many of the features of 7 like screen recording, audio recording, and trimming have been brought into version X, while simple conversion, encoding, and export features have been adopted by OS X Finder instead, which is great, but having a single video playing and editing app is preferable for many Mac users, and often iMovie doesn’t quite fit that bill. Perhaps Apple will restore some of the more advanced functionality down the road in a future update to QuickTime X, but for now it’s certainly nice to have the option to run the older, feature rich, and still very functional, 7.6.6 release.