Webcasting, Windows Media or Quicktime?

schlarbo asks: "I need to help produce a live webcast and was hoping to get some insight on the process from people with experience. We are a media house in Western Australia that uses Apple computers. We have the cameras, computers and a digital converter for the cameras. However, the big question is: should we use Quicktime Broadcaster, or rent a Windows XP laptop and use Windows Media Player to do the webcast?"

Comments

If you already have the hardware/software

[Utopia]

I would say go with Quicktime. Just provide a link to the player download.
Honestly I am not sure you can create a broadcast using just Windows Media Player. You need Windows Media Encoder + Windows Server.

On a related note. I briefly provided some support to a India-based site.
Which provides video in Real, Quciktime & Windows Media.
75% choose to view in Windows Media.

Re:If you already have the hardware/software

[agraupe]

I'd go with MPEG-4, because it is fairly common, and is well-supported by open source compared to H.264 or other alternatives.

Re:If you already have the hardware/software

[greenlead]

"... but locking to WMV is a sin." Exactly; try to find a universal format for your files. I use Darwin Streaming Server (the free version of Quicktime Server). It does its job well. For formats that Darwin does not support, I use good old fashioned HTTP streaming via Apache. I use these because of cost, security, and simplicity; they run on Linux. Another thing to consider is transcoding. You may be able to keep everyone happy by keeping your original files in a high-resolution format and transcoding them to the requested format (file type, size) that your users need. Keep the transcoded files in a cache on your media servers, and leave the original on your file server.

Who are your audience?

[metamatic]

If you want Mac and Linux users to be able to watch it, use MPEG-4 via QTSS.

If you want to give Mac and Linux users the finger, go ahead and use Microsoft's tools.

Re:Who are your audience?

[ForumTroll]

I use Linux primarily and I don't consider using WMV the equivalent of "giving us the finger". WMV is by far the most convenient for the majority of people and I can get WMV working very easily under Linux and MacOS X (Xine, MPlayer etc.). Quicktime is a poor choice because many Windows and Linux users won't have the codec installed and unless your videos are very important many people will not bother to install it to watch them. WMV also produces similar quality in smaller file sizes.

Since Windows has such dominance in the OS marketplace, WMV would give you the widest demographic by far.

Re:Who are your audience?

[jdclucidly]

This couldn't be any more patently false. The only way to play WMV9 and 10 in Linux is to have an ILLEGAL copy of the codecs installed in /usr/lib/win32. On the other hand, Quicktime generates standards-compliant MPEG4 + AAC streams in an MP4/MOV container. These are decoded using the free and open source ffmpeg libraries.

Neither....

[Trelane]

You should be using Fluendo's Flumotion. From the site:

The basic server product is free software, distributed under the GPL. If you want to stream content to your customers using unemcumbered royalty-free media formats (for example, Ogg/Vorbis and Ogg/Theora), you can easily do so without having to take out any license or support contract with us.

On the other hand, if you do license the Advanced Streaming Server, you get the additional features of our commercial server version. This includes professional GUI administration tools, access to proprietary formats for streaming such as MPEG, and access to our support engineers.

So you can stream in Ogg/Theora for free (free plugins for the end users, too), or you can pay them money and stream in MPEG and friends [no plugin needed].

Why is this an either/or question?

[Myself]

Do both! There's no reason you can't split the signal and encode to every popular format at once. If someone has trouble getting their favorite client working, they can try another one.

My favorite radio station webcasts in Real, WMA, and two bitrates of MP3 simultaneously. You'd do well to follow that lead.

Re:Great solution, but...

[Trelane]

..I assume he's putting on the show because he wants people to, you know, actually watch it. ;)

Nice slam on Ogg/Vorbis+Ogg/Theora, but them's the facts. It depends on the budget. You can do it for free, if you have little/no budget, or you can pay them for it and use something that people have installed already [which, notably, you have to do for the other solutions already]. Quicktime, you will remember, requires a [free] download for Windows users (no love for anybody else) and Windows Media only works on Windows (though, depending on how you do it, you can make it less annoying for other users). With MPEG or Ogg/Theora, you reach all users (and it's potentially free!)

Additionally, you can just use the free free Java applet and the end-users need not download anything [it does Vorbis+Theora already!]. (well, honestly, I don't know if they need to download Sun's Java; if it works with MS-Java (i.e. JRE 1.1), then nobody on the mainstream platforms needs to download anything.)

So you have several different ways you can do it for free and reach everybody (possibly with a free download, like QuickTime), and several different ways you can do it for not-free with no downloads necessary, reaching all users both ways. Sounds like a good deal to me.

First, answer some questions

[RobTerrell]

There are some incredibly ignorant answers above.

First of all, you can't stream live Flash video without a Flash Communication Server license, and it's one of the most expensive prospects in the entire streaming world right now, plus most of the world still only has the Flash 7 live codecs, which are a shitty subset of H.264, so skip that. Secondly, everyone who saying crap like VLC and ogg theora... please. Shut the fuck up. He's specifically asking about Windows Media and Quicktime.

Refreshingly, the post that asks about your audience is dead on. The choice of streaming format will be entirely driven by your audience (and also by your budget).

Some questions to consider:

• Do you have streaming servers? What formats do they handle? If not, you need to start learning their care and feeding right now.
  
  
• How many users do you expect? Do your streaming servers have adequate bandwidth? Do you know how to calculate adequate bandwidth? Are your end users all in australia, or are they international? Have you considered a CDN like Akamai, Playstream, VitalStream, etc.?
  
  
• Are you archiving on the server or on the encoder? Are you backing to tape, for the inevitable "I forgot to hit record" issues?
  
  

If this is your first webcast, you might do well to call a streaming expert (I recommend www.incitedmedia.com, ask for Joe -- they did Live8 so they know what they're doing) and ask some questions.

Keep in mind: Windows Media looks like crap on Macs. Quicktime is on lots more Windows machines nowadays thanks to iTunes. Quicktime Broadcaster isn't as rock-solid as Windows Media Encoder (and certainly isn't nearly as fully-featured) but will run on the machines you already have.

Quicktime all the way.

[Yaztromo]

I'd personally use Quicktime Broadcaster and the Darwin Streaming Server all the way. You already have the hardware for it, both are completely free (as in beer, although DSS is also free as in speech), and you have a wide selection of compressors and packetizers.

Yes, I've heard the Windows users cry "but we don't want to use Quicktime!". My suggestion would be not to force them to by using a standard packetizer and compressor. If quality is your goal, use H.264 for both -- Mac and Linux users can view such streams easily, and Windows users only need either Quicktime or VLC. Or, if you want to sacrifice some quality, use standard MPEG-4 for both. Quicktime Broadcaster will happily handle such formats, and everyone should be able to play them with whatever player they want.

So broadcast using the free Quicktime solutions, but use a standard format, and everyone can be made happy.

Yaz.

Players vs Formats

[@madeus]

The poster should definitely go with QuickTime Broadcaster IMO, and encode the movies with QuickTime Pro (for the ~30 USD it will cost). It's far better quality (by a long way) and it's a more efficient in delivering good quality video (so streams are ultimately more reliable for end users).

With QuickTime Pro, you can even encode files for streaming that will work well on a regular web server, by pre-encoding them in a number of different sizes/quality, all hinted appropriately is ideal. QuickTime Broadcaster is great for encoding on the fly though - and it won't cost you anything (though requires a Mac).

However, I'd strongly suggest encoding in straight MPEG4 (rather than as a .MOV) which, as a standard that has wide industry support, doesn't require the QuickTime Player and will merrily play in whatever suitable software the user has available - including Windows Media Player.

I can understand why someone might want to encode in way that requires the QuickTime Player if they were are trying to improve the quality and efficiency of the stream, but really the only sensible reason to use the .WMV format is if you want to distribute DRM'd video.

Re:Great solution, but...

[Trelane]

It depends on a lot of things, of which budget is one.

The reason I said this was because budget is a constraint, and the Fluendo software lets you choose--free or not free. It has flexibility that the others do. I'm well aware of the fact that there are other considerations, as you can tell by the rest of my posts.

I think we can assume that the submitter is better aware of his own needs than either you or I, and he's narrowed it down to these two readily available solutions.

Problem is that it's the Big Two, so it's quite possible that the poster is entirely unaware of some other solutions out there [Flumotion, in this case]. None of us is omniscient, and the little guys (some of whom have kickass product, but lack a big enough marketing budget) don't get nearly the mindshare of larger companies, and I was trying to make the poster aware of Flumotion's offering in this space, with the potential to work better with his budget than the others.

However, there's always a few in the crowd who, when asked whether the Toyota is better than the Honda or what, can't resist the urge to chime in "Buy a unicycle!" He asked about QT and WMV - presumably, if he was interested in a survey of everyone's pet faves, the question would have been a bit more open-ended.

Nice slam on me personally, but I'm not recommending he buy a unicycle. More along the lines of "Look at the MG; it has offerings on par of the other two, but has better fuel economy, but on the other hand costs more since it's a much smaller vendor and must be imported." [NOTE: I don't know if any of these are true of the MG.] Your claim that I'm effectivly recommending a "unicycle" would be true if I told him to use, say, cat to get the image to the website, and use server push to get it to the clients. I'm only recommending a product that may well do the same or better job than the products about which the poster spoke, and do so potentially at a lower price and reach a larger audience!

If recommending to someone a product which may well turn out to be the superior offering than what they're cosidering is wrong, then I don't want to be right. Thank the Lord that it's not wrong. It takes the poster maybe a minute to read my post and maybe another couple of minutes to look at Fluendo. At that point he/she may choose to look at it closer or decide I'm a quack and drop it. But at least I've (helpfully/helpfully) pointed out a product that could do a better job than the two products of which he/she is already aware, and it cost him/her little to no effort to evaluate the new information of which he/she is probably unaware, and make a decision as to go investigate further or move on. Not out of line at all.

Missing Link - Re:VLC

[pjay_dml]

Video Lan Client - VLC

Also worth mentioning:

• Open Source !!!
• During installation you can select to install Mozilla/Firefox plugin
• Has been implemented with a variety of successful profesional projects