We have submitted version 4.3.8 of iScreensaver Personal to the Mac App Store (MAS).
This version includes enhanced support for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, and for the newest version of Safari (5.1) that has been released for use with Mac OS X 10.6.8,.
It includes numerous other small bug-fixes and improvements.
As soon as Apple approves version 4.3.8, we recommend that all users upgrade via the Mac App Store, re-build your screensaver(s), and re-install them.
As you may or may not be aware, part of the deal with the Mac App Store is that businesses have no information about customers. We are sorry to hear you are disappointed, and you are welcome to try to get a refund, but that transaction is 100% between you and Apple Inc.
The symptoms you describe are well-known, and documented in several places, including on the Mac App Store site itself. (To see this, please click this link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iscreensaver-personal-4/id417636736?mt=12 then click the “…More…” button )
The cause? A long-standing bug in Mac OS X.
The solution is to re-export your video to a different codec. Usually just re-exporting it as an H.264 file from within QuickTime Pro will do the trick.
If this does work, we hope you can give us a good review on the store.
I just purchased your app today and after spending several hours working on a video in Premiere Pro and successfully creating a screensaver via your app… it doesn’t work.
When in the Sys Prefs and running the screensaver in ‘test’ mode it works perfectly. When actually trying to activate it in the Finder, it fails every time. It starts up but quickly quits out.
I couldn’t be less impressed than I am.
Oh… and how do I go about obtaining a full refund? Should I take it up with Apple directly?
Handbrake is a great (free) app to use for re-encoding videos, to avoid the black-screen bug. It also makes it easy to downsize videos for smoother playback on older hardware. Visit http://handbrake.fr for more info.
Thanks, JLG. We haven’t evaluated Handbrake for this purpose, so we can’t comment as to the quality of the H264 videos it produces, but if it works for you and if free is an important price point, then by all means go for it!
For our pro customers, we recommend the $29 QuickTime Pro tool as perhaps the safest way to accomplish re-encoding videos. The reason : since iScreensaver uses QuickTime for video playback, it makes sense to also use QuickTime for video encoding. In theory, at least, one would expect that using the same libraries for encoding and playback would give the best results…
