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Darwin Streaming Server Beats Real, Windows Media
pinqkandi writes "Network Computing recently ran an extensive shootout of video streaming servers, in areas from setup to quality to buffering times. The free, open source Darwin Streaming Server, which streams QuickTime content, edged out costly and closed source Windows Media & RealVideo streaming systems." Well, it edged out Real. It blew Microsoft away.
I've played with Darwin a bit, the thing to understand is there are a lot of peices to a 'media server'. There's a video encoder card (the oone they used was $2,000) and there's a encoder, like WMA, Real, or Sorenson. Once you put the video source and the encoder together you have a 'video source', which is what these media servers will 'serve' to the clients.
You could think of Darwin as a amplifier, as it only does the TCP/IP server end, Real and Windows Media do the whole thing. It's also interesting that the auther credits Apple with having a such a wonderfull FREE product, but then lists the $250 Sorenson Media's Broadcaster and the $500 Sorenson 3 encoder ($499), not exactly free. While Real charges around 5k for the whole package and Microsoft charges nothing as it comes with Win2k.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Hmm. I haven't used On2 in a while, but Sorenson 3 really is the good stuff, the best I've seen so far. I've been really amazed at what it's capable of; 600x400-ish video at 200 k/s, that does NOT look compressed, at all. This is with the free encoder without using Media Cleaner.
Sorenson 2 isn't much competition for anything anymore.
I'd think in the future, Sorenson 3 will be more like the high-quality versions of the Qdesign codec- kicks the crap out of the MPEG solution, but more proprietary (and no free high-quality encoders). You'll probably see movie trailers available in higher-quality, lower-bitrate versions next to MPEG-4 versions.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
Not bad for something open source and free.
Note that QTSS is NOT a project started by random open-source developers who wanted to play around; it's a project built and funded entirely by Apple, which chose to release it as open source after it was already running (it was previously called Darwin Streaming Server and was released before Mac OS X 1.0 shipped).
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
...of the article was the software ratings compared with the user survey:
What is the most important aspect of a video stream?
Low Bandwidth 27%
Quality 73%
Video Quality Report Card:
QuickTime 4.1
Real 3.7
WMP 2.5
In what format do you provide content to your users?
QuickTime 22%
Real 31%
WMP 42%
In other words, with quality being the most important factor, WMP wins - despite being the lowest quality of all. (Both QuickTime and Windows Media solutions are free) Hmmm... sounds like other familiar Microsoftian stories.