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QuickTime Broadcaster Available
firegate writes "A lot of people have been thrilled since the release of Apple's Open Source Darwin Streaming Server. Unfortunately, to stream live video, you previously had to buy a product called Sorenson Broadcaster (Win/Mac). Apple has now released a tool called QuickTime Broadcaster which accomplishes the same task, except this product is free. From what I understand, this application is a scaled-down version of Sorenson's Broadcaster. Apple has only released a Mac OS X version of the program for now, so I guess that we PC guys will need to keep buying the Sorenson product for now. Hopefully, Apple will realize how profitable a Windows or Linux version could be."
If they're giving it away for free (as in beer, presumably), how is it going to be profitable for Windows/Linux? They're already not making a profit on the MacOS X version. The whole point is that a profitable one already exists - the Sorenson Broadcaster. It's not free. The point of the story was that Apple's Quicktime Broadcaster is free.
They'll be selling more machines, and making more profits, if they don't port it to linux or windows.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
The funny thing is, I feel like Sun is just kidding themselves when they say they compete directly with MS - sure, MS is a big competitor for them, but they only impact a small part of MS. Apple actually competes against a large portion of MS's offerings, and they have the established reputation (and the loyalty of current customers) to possibly do well.
Will they kill MS? I don't think so - but they stand a chance with this agressive push of "we can do things that the PC can't or can't do as well" of reclaiming some market share.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Hopefully, Apple will realize how profitable a Windows or Linux version could be.
Are you kidding? On a product that they already give away for free for Mac OS X? Besides, when was the last time you saw a Linux user buy ANYTHING? Gimme a break.
Apple doesn't care how profitable something could be on Windows and Linux.
They're not trying to have the enormous grasp of three platforms. They are perfectly content to maintain their loyal following, and hopefully steal mindshare and eventually market share from the other two. They don't give a good god damn about whether a windows user would like it, because frankly, they don't want to have software on Windows beyond what is absolutely necessary (read: quicktime).
As a newly appointed Mac user, I couldn't be happier with that strategy.
Besides, how could it be profitable if they give it away for free?
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
How are things in the civilized world? You probably don't know who I am. That's
;).
okay. I'm here to inform you of my mission, what I've found, and what I hope to
teach all of you.
I work for the United Christians Food for Poor Kids Foundation, and let me tell
you, there's a lot of poor kids in Afghanistan. As in most countries in the
Middle East, most people are unemployed, and therefore poor. And where there's a
lot of poor people, UCFPKF is needed.
UCFPKF always has the latest in technology. In this instance, we had access to
some Pentium 4's(r) 2GHz. Obviously, we needed an operating system that could
handle the power of Intel's beast. Unfortunately, we didn't have any computer
experts on hand up to the task, so it was going to be trial and error.
We'd heard good things about Linux and its "ACL's". Little did we know of its
incompatibility with modern hardware. It didn't even support Token Ring
networking, the newest form of Ethernet(r), which we require to always keep
in contact between bases. Also, it didn't seem to use SSE optimizations, which
when processing food amounts, are also very important. Also, there were
homo-erotic implications in the structure of Linux, which is strictly
unallowable in a Christian organization such as ours.
The next obvious step was to install Windows. We hesitated because we knew that
it was common knowledge that Windows crashed incessantly. Our experience was
less than stellar. It also didn't support Token Ring networking. Security is
important in this region because many people try to steal food, but "Windows
2000" (which I hear didn't even come out in 2000) doesn't even allow you to
have seperate permissions. Once again, the SSE optimizations were not used.
I was in a situation that seemed impossible. The two most famous operating
systems had failed me. I walked around the base in a dazed stupor. What was I
going to do for our ultra-important network? A boy saw me pouting and sighing,
and asked me what was wrong. I said nothing, but we exchanged names, and little
did I know, that young Junis had a gift for computers.
Junis saw me the next day, slaving away at the sparse terminal that "Windows
2000" makes you type in. He asked what I was doing with that primitive OS. I
laughed and told him that I was doing inventory. He ran to his village, into his
hut, and pulled out a box I had never seen before. The box said "SCO Xenix" the
front. I had never seen or heard of this Xenix before. But I soon learned that
Junis was a computer genius.
All we had to do was put the Xenix CD into the computer, and everything worked
like magic (not the devil's magic... good magic:) ). Our Token Ring network
integrated flawlessly with it. And it even used SSE optimizations. Well, me and
Junis are now on a new mission. We're spreading the word. It might not be the
word of the lord, but then again, maybe it is
SCO Xenix: The Unix of Tomorrow.
Janet Milman
Network Administrator, UCFPKF
Afghanistan base
- posted by poopbot: crapflooding since 7/8/02
qGy9SkMLPj
Hopefully, Apple will realize how profitable a Windows or Linux version could be.
It can't be very profitable if they give it away for free. They would have to charge for it like Sorenson already does, making the free Mac streaming solution cheaper. Which is exactly the way it is and exactly the way Apple likes it.
Lies about crimes
It's a well known fact that Apple, since its inception, has been a haven for "free thinkers" and "progressive thought," heralded by none other than famous acid-tripping Steve Jobs and his hippy buddies from California. It was on one of the famous beach parties, notorious for getting out of hand, that Clarus was born.
It was a balmy night in August 1983 that Jobs held yet another beach party, this one with a special theme: who could come up with a mascot for the Mac development team? Of course, the Apple II team was there and tensions, as always, were high. That didn't deter the Mac team from bringing their "pet," Clara, a cow they'd been raising on the Apple campus since birth.
Clara was birthed by the Mac team when they'd held a party on the Apple campus and had hired a bull-breeder as entertainment. All night long, the bull-breeder studded Hercules, his prize bull, with an assortment of cows. As the festivities continued throughout the night, a strange moaning was coming from one of the trailers. One of the cows he'd brought with him was, unbeknownst to the bull-breeder, pregnant! The Mac development team, being the resourceful hackers they were, helped give birth to the calf, the mother losing its life in the process. The bull-breeder was so taken by the Mac dev team's efforts he let them keep the cow, which they named Clara.
Now, at the August 1983 beach party, the Mac team lobbied for Jobs to adopt Clara as the development mascot of the Macintosh. The Apple II team, spurned and bitter because of dwindling sales and neglect at the hand of Jobs, had brought their own mascot-- Cletus, a vicious Rotweiler they'd bought from a ruddy-faced street man in the ghetto of Cupertino for $25. Cletus was a frothing, flea-and-mange ridden terror that barked at the least provocation. The Apple II team fed it raw goat meat and corrupted 5.25 floppies to make it mean. They also kicked it and made sure its chain was too tight at all time. Here at the party was their chance for revenge at Jobs and his favorite Mac development team.
As the night wore on, both the Apple II and Mac teams got drunker and drunker before Jobs called for a company vote on the mascot. What met the company's faces was something none of them could have imagined, however.
In their drunken, stoned stupor, the embittered Apple II team had snuck into Clara's trailer and cut the rear end of off Clara! Drugging her with ether to staunch her cries, they had used an electric chainsaw, cut her back legs and rectum cleanly off, and taken them to the bonfire to cook and eat. They'd even fed some to the drunk Mac dev team! After they'd done this, they forced Cletus into the gaping hole in Clara's rear end. Gnawing away at his first real meal in months, Cletus lodged himself in Clara's colon and couldn't break free. So when the Mac dev team opened Clara's trailer and led their pet down the ramp, they were met with a bloody, gut-strewn mess and a weird, unnatural animal call of "moof!"
The entire company was sickened by this and soon the sand was dotted with puddles of vomit. Cries of "moof, moof!" filled the air as the joined dog-cow trundled terribly along the beach, seizuring with each step, vomiting an icky mass of hair and blood, with a glazed look in its cow eyes. With a final shudder, the dog-cow fell and died, and the partygoers surrounded the putrid mess of bovine/canine flesh. Of course, it didn't take long for the Mac dev team to discover the Apple II team's treachery and a bloody brawl ensued over the death of Clara. By the end of the night, the cow, the dog, and the Apple II team were simple piles of broken, bloody bones.
In light of the events that night, Jobs had no other choice to commemorate the tragic events that had unfurled and therefore made Apple's development mascot the dog-cow, "Clarus," a merging of the two animals names-- Cletus and Clara.
And that, for those who didn't know, is the origin of Clarus the dog-cow. Every time you click on a Mac OS Easter-egg that utters "moof," you can look back to the terrible events that August, 1983 night at the Apple beach party that brought you the Clarus, the dog-cow.
I doubt Sorenson would be happy if Apple started giving away a product that contained their licensed codec in such a way that it directly competed with the product that Sorenson itself sells.
I think the PC folks are stuck buying, while Apple users will benefit from the windfall of the long established relationship between apple and their technology partners.
They already paid for it - they bought a Mac.
I remember a while ago, hearing about the MPEG-4 licencing schemes. Wasn't it like two cents per minute of live broadcast video? Since Quicktime's MPEG-4 implementation is the ISO standard, they can't even claim that they aren't using the standard specified so that they don't have to pay licensing fees. I guess MPEG-4 is going the same way as MP3, that there is someone out there who you (technically) owe money too, but nobody really cares. Sometimes I really wonder where the money is made in codecs, and remind myself that they don't always, thank you vorbis.
I'm sure Apple realizes how profitable a Windows/Linux version would be....for PC manufactures and Microsoft.
I don't understand why everyone feels that it's Apple's job to transfer its competitive advantages to every other operating system people want to use. If you really feel that QT Broadcaster is valuable and useful - why not consider buying a Mac? OSX is unix-based, the hardware is pretty good, the price delta is pretty small, and you can even run Linux on the hardware. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
1) download and install Streaming Server and Broadcaster
2) start Streaming Server
3) start Broadcaster and point it at Streaming Server
4) start Movie Player and enter the URL of your Streaming Server
5) if video doesn't stream, plug in camera and repeat step 4
6) save movie to iDisk, in the Movies directory
7) log into homepage.mac.com
8) create account
9) create new movie page, select background, and select saved movie from iDisk
10) there is no step 10.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
And, unlike OS9, Mac OS X is really superior to Windows. Once Macs get in the door, they stand a real chance of taking over. So, where's the profit in giving away Windows software again?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Why do you need steps 6 through 10? I don't think there's any advantage to hosting the
~jeff
Your argument is that by making QT streaming servers more prevalent (by letting you do it on Win/Lin for free), you'd make QT content more ubiquitous.
That's not an awful argument, but it's still not an argument about profitability.
Your strategy has them losing money (for every Mac box not sold) in exchange for ubiquity.
But...Apple could be the #1 media format, and if it's not growing its OS share and not making fat profits, it will still still get pummeled for "dying".
Seems to me like a bad argument in the big picture.
The *real* strategy is making both QT *and* Mac boxen attractive to other users, and that seems to be what they're doing here.
-Turkey
-Turkey
As of yet, there are no good programs (SHOUTcast doesn't count, no GUI) to broadcast streaming media live from a Macintosh computer. I'm surprised that video came first! At this point, Quicktime Streaming Server will only broadcast pre-recorded MP3's. When will Apple release something like this?
It's not an .sdp file, it's a QuickTime movie file embedded in a pretty web page that takes seconds to create using homepage.mac.com. The movie contains an SDP reference to my streaming server, but otherwise behaves like any other QuickTime movie embedded in a web page --except it's playing live audio/video from my very own broadcaster.
At present the software streams MPEG-1 or 2; MPEG-4 will be supported shortly.
MPEG4IP includes an open source live MPEG-4 encoder for Linux.
They will certainly keep it Mac only (at least for a while) in order to sell xserves. An xserve with free streaming software will be competetive with a WinTel box plus expensive streaming software. Thus more xserve sales.
Sorenson Broadcaster never supported anything past QT 4.1.2 on Mac OS 9, although the windows version did support QT 5 - they kept saying a QT 5 compatible version was coming, but it never did -
presumably Sorenson was aware of Apples developmen tof QT Broadcaster, and let it slide -
the features and layout of SB & QTB are almost identical, if you are familiar with SB, QTB will make sense right away, QTB seems easier to use, being from apple and all, but it is a pretty direct rip-off of SB
both SB and QTB work with a variety of codecs, H263, etc, not just sorensons...
Apple's having a free, robust, apple-easy streaming architecture with QTSS & QTB, will hopefully pay off in Hardware/OS sales down the road...
realserver licences are quite expensive, i understand...
QuickTime Boradcaster and QuickTime Streaming Server make a pretty good (and cheap!) pair.
FYI: Apple offer in-depth technical training on how to deploy real-time streaming using these tools. Been hearing good things about a course they offer called 'QuickTime Streaming' which talks about how to roll this stuff out in the real world.
http://train.apple.com (click the course link).
MPEG-4 live streaming fan...
Quicktime seems to produce higher quality content than both windows media and Real content, so why isn't it very popoular? If you look at the BBC they only have Real content and that is also the case with most news feeds.