Re: Quicktime or Windows Media Player?
- From: "cwdjrxyz" <spamtrap2@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 13 Feb 2007 09:41:00 -0800
On Feb 13, 4:44 am, John Lockwood <john.lockw...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 12/2/07 19:37, in article
2A95CAE3-7C10-4168-9C44-FF825AD1F...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Rob564"
<Rob...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I need to stream media from a website that many people will use, which media
player should I use Quicktime or Windows media player.
QuickTime is generally regarded as giving the best quality which is why all
the Movie trailers (or the majority) use it (or more accurately MPEG4
H.264). A surprisingly large number of music videos are in QuickTime format
(if one ignores YouTube and MySpace which exclusively use Flash).
So far as I know, YouTube and MySpace only use a medium quality flash
for viewing videos on the web. So does Google video for viewing on the
web. However, for saved videos using the Google player, Google
sometimes uses an AVI stream of much larger file size that you can
sometimes recover from the temporary cache using a few tricks.
Actually QT, as many other formats, can give a quality range of very
poor to HD. For example the QT encoder I use to encode .mov files can
use H264, H263, Photo Jpeg, MPEG4, and Sorenson Video for the video
portion and MP2/4 AAC, MP3(256,128,192,96),PCM, IMA, and AMR audio
formats. Most of the other more popular formats also are capable of a
wide range of sub-formats and quality(mobile-phone formats are another
matter). One can not say that QT .mov is better or worse than any
other format unless you specify exactly the video and audio subformats
that are used for encoding for the two systems being compared.
WMP would provide very very poor support for none Windows users (i.e. Macs).
The WMP can be installed on some Macs. However it is not available at
all for most other OSs. However several other players that can be
installed on a wider range of OSs will support Windows media formats.
The Real Player and the Winamp player will support several Microsoft A/
V formats.
Flash would give the widest support (Windows, Mac, other) but gives the
worst quality. It also seems the fastest and least prone to stuttering
(probably because it is compressed the most, hence the poor visual quality).
If you use Flash I suggest sticking with .swf as I believe it is more common
at this stage.
No, flash can give everything from poor video quality to near HD
quality, depending on how you encode it. For quality movies, you
should use the flv (flash video) video. The swf file then is just a
small sized container for the flv, that also can include other swf
elements such as text, a background, etc. You can select many degrees
of compression for the flv, just as you can for most other formats.
Flash has grown up. Although the complete official flash software is
very expensive, one can now buy a flv/swf encoder for video only for
under $US 50, and this is what I use.
Real works better on the Mac than WMP (or Flip4Mac) for streams, but the
majority of Mac users would not have it installed.
Some sites choose to provide two (or even three) choices so the user can
decide what's best for themselves.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Quicktime or Windows Media Player?
- From: Rob564
- Re: Quicktime or Windows Media Player?
- References:
- Re: Quicktime or Windows Media Player?
- From: John Lockwood
- Re: Quicktime or Windows Media Player?
- Prev by Date: Detecting gliches in audio files.
- Next by Date: Re: Windows Media Player 11
- Previous by thread: Re: Quicktime or Windows Media Player?
- Next by thread: Re: Quicktime or Windows Media Player?
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
