Is this some kind of cruel joke? I watched the streaming video from Apple's site on my cable modem last night. The video and audio reminded me of the HORRIBLE Vivo video suite. I thought this was supposed to spank Real and M$?? Not with THAT kind of quality! I love the new features in the player, though, for the most part. First of all, what happened to import for CD tracks? BIG mistake. The sound for clips, though, is AWESOME! I love those bass/treble controls!
Anyway, Apple needs to do a LOT of work in order to make any sort of inroads in the streaming video market. What I saw last night isn't going to cut it.....

Well, Last night, video straming was great. It's more jam now during the day in the US.

We don't think we have seen anything this good at higher bit rate from either M$ nor Real.

Watching 128Kbps ISDN streaming using DSL is very good. This is the first we could sync the speaker's mouth movement to what they are saying.

Are you watching live streaming at 1067x768? Try http://www.apple.com/quicktime/showcase/live/bbc/bbc56.mov and compare to pnm://rm.bbc.net.uk/news/live/now45.rm They are both 56K level LIVE streaming.

Take a close look at shardow/highlight details and fps :-) QT4 is way better

Actually, I haven't had any problems with the streaming features. I've found the quality at "112k" is about the same, or perhaps a bit better, than RealPlayer at similar bitrates.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
Contributing Editor,
MacN

I normally use the ‘vicom Internet gateway’.

And that is the problem. With the ISDN modem directly connected to the computer everything works fine. But with the ‘vicom Internet gateway’ nothing happens.

According to the apple website. IP translation does not work if the router does not support RTPS.

I hope I can upgrade the Internet gateway so it does work. But what about my company they use a hardware ISDN router. Will this ever work? I have never had any problems with Realplayer so is apple going to solve this?


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Niek

Scott,

Did you check (with the 128K connection setting) that you actually get 128K stream?

If you check the BBC live streaming (at apple). It looks like it always fix at 56K stream?

[This message has been edited by MacNW (edited 04-20-99).]

The simplest way to find out if we get better bitrate is by noting the viewing area. Higher bitrate normally has larger viewing area.

Did you get larger area when setting the connection to 128K (from 56K)?

I have no problem inporting CD Audio tracks, but I am using the pro version...

I found that streaming on a 28.8 modem was worse than using real player. The video would eventually stop at some points and i only heard a little of the audio. This problem could have been because of the number of people doing the streaming stuff, though.

-/\\ahoo

I think I must have found a bug or something. When I watch BBC on my 7600/120 with 28.8 modem the quality is fine for about 5 seconds, then the picture starts to flash, and then the sound goes, making it impossible to understand. Blinding new interface though! Although i would like a simple way to watch a stream from within the quicktime player then watching in the browser.

The first time I used QuickTime 4 Streaming, I thought it was horrible too - just like others have said - on a 28.8 modem, video and audio would play for about five seconds, and then the audio would stop, and the video would flash on and off over and over, until I stopped it. However, when I tried it again, later that night, streaming was smooth for about five minutes - great video and audio compared to RealAudio - but then the same thing that happened the first time would happen again. Not good! This has to be some kind of a bug - but great while it lasted!
Also, to watch a stream from QT Player, all you have to do is go to the file menu, and choose "Open URL..." - type in the address, click okay, and the stream will start - just make sure you have the address of the ACTUAL STREAM FILE, not the address of the web page where the stream will play.

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Galen Panger
No Wonder Mac "Real World" Certified
galenp@nowonder.com
http://www.nowonder.com

More than anything I have noticed the inconsistency in quality, and from what I can tell the only holdup to perfection is bandwidth. I have been using real for a while and it seems to be consistently crappy. We’ll just have to wait, I believe.