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?"

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: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.

If you don't own it, don't rely on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize that what you are asking after is either utilizing the Windows Media versus Quicktime, but I would suggest going with Quicktime as it is in house. Our high school broadcast every single concert we had in real time using a Real encoder. Every time you set up for a concert, something had the ability to go wrong rather easily, granted we were high school students at the time. If you are having to rent a Windows XP box that you haven't tested or have experience with extensively, you are more likely to have less problems. Also, I'm not completely sure how easy it is going to be to rent an XP box that has an internal card to send the BNC (or whatever cabling you are actually using) through, though that could be mitigated if you are using an external card.

You are probably much better going with Quicktime.

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.

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.