Smooth Streaming for QuickTime 5
Public preview of Apple's popular media player promises smoother playback and downloads, and more realistic 3D.David Essex, special to PCWorld.com
The grandparent of media player software, Apple's QuickTime, is being positioned to reassert its reign in streaming media with its latest update.
Available for download as a public beta at Apple's site, QuickTime 5 and the QuickTime Streaming Server 3 could sharply improve the quality of Web-downloaded videos while being easier to use, analysts suggest.
Introduced in 1991 as a way to play postage-stamp-size videos from hard drives, QuickTime has stayed competitive with media technologies from archrivals Microsoft and RealNetworks, both of which updated their entries this year. (See "Streaming Shootout: RealPlayer Versus Windows Media.")
Microsoft is shipping Windows Media Player 7, which is also bundled with Windows Millennium Edition; RealNetworks is up to RealPlayer 8. (See "Microsoft Updates Windows Media Player" and "Real Changes Improve RealPlayer 8.")
Microsoft, a relative upstart that quickly gained market share in the past two years, released a Macintosh version of its player on October 11. With QuickTime 5, Apple could upstage some of that threat and maintain its popularity for film trailers and short movies with Internet-focused enhancements for playback and downloads. (See "A Quick Look at QuickTime 4.1.")
Playback Improvements
Unveiled in October at Apple's QuickTime Live Conference, QuickTime 5 has new Skip Protection technology from Apple that prevents video frames from being dropped during erratic Internet transmissions.
"It keeps the pipe filled at all times," says Frank Casanova, director of QuickTime product marketing, referring to how QuickTime intelligently manages the memory buffer that stores video streams as they download. Competing approaches, such as SureStream from RealNetworks, merely "down-shift" when transmission speeds drop, resulting in dropped frames and Net-congestion alerts that Skip Protection can usually avoid, Casanova says. "You don't see any disruption in service" with QuickTime, he claims.
The QuickTime 5 player also has new audio and video user interfaces and supports the latest third-party plug-ins, such as Macromedia's Flash 4. An in-place component downloader lets you easily get additional software that is sometimes needed to run media files. Apple maintains the components on its own servers, where QuickTime 5 can find and run them in the background rather than directing you to the developer's Web site for a more manually intensive download. QuickTime VR, which is popular with some game developers and with automobile companies that use it in virtual-reality programs, now allows 360-degree Cubic VR panoramas, Casanova says.
Other key components now or soon to be supported in QuickTime 5 include the Sorenson Video 3 codec, MPEG-1, On2 broadband video, and BeHere 3D video.
The QuickTime 5 public preview is available only for the Macintosh; a Windows preview is coming before the end of the year. As with previous releases, Apple will offer a $29.99 Pro version with additional file-level controls and editing features. The server software comes in a Mac OS X version and in an open source edition that runs on Windows NT and several UNIX variants. Apple expects to ship final code in early 2001, Apple says.
A Film Trailer Favorite
QuickTime is especially popular for Web distribution of movie trailers, partly because of the Mac's popularity in Hollywood. Also, some in the industry--prominently George Lucas's Lucasfilms--believe QuickTime video is superior to alternatives.
"Some artists will say, 'I only want my downloads in QuickTime,'" says Richard Doherty, director or research at The Envisioneering Group, a market research firm.
Doherty, who has used QuickTime 5, gives the preview generally high marks but says Skip Protection is fundamentally a buffering technology like those in Windows Media Player and Real Player, and its quality remains to be seen. The new component downloader, on the other hand, does a clearly superior job of removing download hassles, he says. "Apple seems to have the most robust implementation yet," he adds.
Analyst Billy Pidgeon of Jupiter Research says the server upgrade is mostly of interest to content providers, but he likes the player's new user interface and enhanced support for 3D. "As long as content providers provide interesting content, you're going to want a QuickTime viewer," Pidgeon says.