Apple's new Quicktime X - Not Quite Working
I purchased the newest version of the Apple operating system, called Snow Leopard, on the first day it was available - which was yesterday.
One of the reasons I wanted to be among the first in line was that Apple included a new version of their well respected Quicktime video player called "Quicktime X." Although they actually took some features away from the older version of Quicktime in this new one - they also added some great new capabilities that I was very interested in..
Two in particular were "reference movies" and "H.264 adaptive bit rate streaming" also known as "HTTP Live Streaming."
REFERENCE MOVIES BROKEN
So it was with great disappointment that I discovered today that the "reference movies" feature is not working except in Apple's own Safari Web browser - which only a small percentage of even Mac owners routinely use to browse the Web.
What are reference movies? First a little background.
THE IPHONE IGNORES FLASH VIDEO
Ever since Apple released its hugely popular iPhone the Web video community has had one major criticism of the otherwise fantastic device...it does not support Flash movies. Why not? Apple says it's because Flash is a huge resource hog and that it would bog down the iPhone user's experience - which is certainly partly true. But I think the larger truth is that Apple has a competing product called Quicktime - they don't want you to use Flash video - they want us Web producers to post our media files as Quicktime movies instead - a format Apple created and largely controls.
So what's the big deal you ask? Why not use Quicktime? We'd often like to but we can't because of an annoying bug: If you embed more than one Quicktime movie onto a single page, say a Gallery page for instance, once a site visitor clicks to play just ONE of these movies ALL of the movies on the page will begin downloading to his or her computer which kills their bandwidth and results in a terrible playback experience.
Flash doesn't have that problem.
Apple did come up with a workaround called reference movies. Basically what happens is that the Quicktime video file instead of being a real movie is now actually a little program that simply POINTS to the real movie - it "references" the location of the actual video file or even SEVERAL video files.
By adding this little intermediate step between clicking play and the movie playing, Apple has solved the problem of all the video files on the page trying to download at once.
Reference movies also have another great feature that Apple really took advantage of in its latest release of Quicktime. When you save a movie from Quicktime X using their "Save for Web" command you now have the option of creating up to 3 different versions of that movie - one designed for users on high speed broadband Internet connections, a smaller video file for persons on slower dial-up connections and the third for those watching your video on cell phones that require the .3gp format. That's a great feature, but. . .
REFERENCE MOVIES NOT WORKING IN FIREFOX
So with that bit of background information out of the way - I can now share with you the problem I've discovered. While Quicktime X does make it very easy to create these reference movies, they will not work in the very popular Firefox browser - only in Apple's own Safari Web browser.
I haven't checked Internet Explorer but I suspect reference movies will not work in that browser either.
Quicktime reference movies generated by Quicktime X do work on the iPhone but that's because the phone uses a mini version of the Safari browser.
ON PURPOSE OR A BUG?
Is this Apple trying something sneaky or just a bug in their code? It's hard to believe that something as major as this did not get noticed by the Apple quality control engineers but please make up your own mind.
H.264 ADAPTIVE BIT RATE STREAMING
Because this post is already getting way too long I will save my thoughts on Quicktime X's other great feature, adaptive bit rate streaming, for a later post when I've had a chance to investigate more fully. But so far I can tell you the picture is mixed!
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Reader Comments (1)
Well, this is part true. The .mov file can not be played directly in Firefox. The movie must be embedded to play in all browsers. Fortunately, When the reference movie gets generated, a sample .html file get generated which shows how to embed the Quicktime Movie into html code.
I know that that is not as nice a sending just a link to a movie. But, when it comes down to it; someone owns patents that would make that possible across all browsers. They do not want to share.