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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?"
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.
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.
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
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.
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.
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.