Bremsstrahlung

It has become apparent that the fellows at Apple have, accidentally or deliberately, hamstrung QuickTime Player 7 with the inclusion of the horrible QuickTime Player Launcher.app.

The symptoms are that QuickTime movie files (.mov) show an ugly QuickTime X icon, QuickTime Player 7 does not even appears as an option for "Open With", and while it can be manually selected, using the Open With... Change All command maddeningly resets QuickTime Player Launcher.app as the default.

The core problem problem is that QuickTime Player 7 itself has been modified to only report its capability for opening QuickTime movie files by filename extension, MIME type, and OS Type, while QuickTime Player Launcher reports being able to do so by Document Content Type UTI. While i can't find a reference for this, it appears that UTIs, as the newest and fanciest method available, take precedence in Launch Services's decision of which application to choose. (Although this does not satisfactorily explain why QuickTime Player 7 doesn't even appear as an option.) If the above isn't enough, QuickTime Player Launcher bumptiously declares 'LSIsAppleDefaultForType' as true for this type. ("Over here! Pick me! Pick Me!")

So, the solution is to patch Item 32 ("Movie-QuickTime") in the Document Types array in QuickTime Player's Info.plist with the information from QuickTime Player Launcher's Info.plist. Here's the XML dump of the corrected entry:

<dict>
    <key>LSHandlerRank</key>
    <string>Owner</string>
    <key>LSIsAppleDefaultForType</key>
    <true/>
    <key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
    <array>
        <string>com.apple.quicktime-movie</string>
    </array>
    <key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
    <array>
        <string>mov</string>
        <string>qt</string>
        <string>qtl</string>
    </array>
    <key>CFBundleTypeIconFile</key>
    <string>Movie-QuickTime.icns</string>
    <key>CFBundleTypeMIMETypes</key>
    <array>
        <string>application/x-quicktimeplayer</string>
    </array>
    <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
    <string>Movie-QuickTime</string>
    <key>CFBundleTypeOSTypes</key>
    <array>
        <string>MooV</string>
        <string>moov</string>
        <string>qtlk</string>
    </array>
    <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
    <string>Editor</string>
    <key>NSDocumentClass</key>
    <string>QTPMovieDocument</string>
</dict>

Note that you may have to save your patched Info.plist to a temporary location, like the Desktop, and then move it into place as you may need to authenticate as an administrator to overwrite the existing version.

After doing this I discovered that I didn't even have to delete or render inoperative QuickTime Player Launcher; it still appears in the list of Open With options, but loses out on being the default choice.