[Briareus]

Greetings. My web host offers QT streaming server & I managed to get it all running on my site for audio (mp4 AAC) and video (.h264) content - not an easy task since I'm no web guru - but I wanted to implement some cool Apple tech. After some constructive criticism I added standard mp3 audio to "appeal to the lowest common denominator" (i.e., those without the latest QT and/or on Windows, etc.).

I learned much about QT streaming & the code necessary to set this up. However, rethinking the whole thing before I add non-streaming video, is all this it worth it for me? I'm just a simple musician who's offering up some free a/v content. Should I chuck the whole QT streaming concept and just go with QT fast start & basic mp3 (sort of http streaming/download, especially if you're on broadband) or are there any "worth the trouble" benefits to offering a/v content in more that one format?

Thanks for any thoughts!

[skalie]

I always found web "streaming" a wierd concept, as it is always restricted by the end user's download speed.

There is of course bandwidth sniffers that adjust the size or quality of the movie, but unless you're actually presenting something live, you may as well use progressive downloads.

Notice that most of the big boys, yahoo etc, are using Flash format these days.

[maccrazy]

Personally I think Flash format has a place when you want to integrate a video into a page on a site, but I don't like sites that use it for other things.

I don't mind QT streaming, but I notice that on your site the videos are quite small. Perhaps a bump in resolution would be a good idea, or perhaps offer a high and low quality version.

[Briareus]

Thanks for your responses - I'm leaning towards the Keep It Simple (tm) solution but will wait a bit for more comments here and at a couple other forums. I guess in order to take full advantage of QTSS I'd need to really expand my content to larger resolutions and think about multiple bandwidth-tailored streams (like Apple does with movie trailers, etc). Feels like a lot to undertake given my situation but the knowledge gained from trying it out will hopefully be beneficial in the future.

[selowitch]

I'm struggling a little bit with QTSS movies on my website. I'm trying to design for maximum cross-platform compatibility and I also want for things to work regardless of whether the user has the QuickTime plug-in installed, so that would suggest embedding. The trouble is, I can't get my <object> and <embed> tags to to work in all browsers. It seems as though what works in MSIE for Windows doesn't work in Safari or Firefox. I also would prefer not to resort to JavaScript because it's not really a standard (although its DOM and ECMAScript aspects, I suppose, are standards of the w3c) and present a whole other set of troubleshooting issues.

Any advice?