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It Done Broke.

Leopard Upgrade Kills Compressor/Qmaster

One of those instances where you thank your stars you did an Archive & Install.

Final Cut’s Compressor needs Qmaster to be running in the background to arbitrate rendering jobs – even if you’re the only machine on the network.  Lots of babies get thrown out with the bathwater when you do a operating system upgrade (including some X11 essentials like xinit and startx – more on that later), and migrating your big cat from Tiger to Leopard is no different.  Compressor is one of the casualties.  There are 4 files in /usr/sbin/ that get tossed: qmastera, qmasterd, qmasterprefs and qmasterqd.

If you did an Archive & Install, you can fish those babies out from /Previous Systems/<YYYY-MM-DD_XXXX>/usr/sbin, but you’ll probably need some Terminal skills.

Strangely enough, the startup launch scripts in /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster will probably still be there, so you can either reboot or again in the Terminal, “sudo /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster start” should get it running again.

Also, perhaps this works but I haven’t tried it.  Anyone?