Cross-platform video w/out QT

[Richard Gaskin]

Chipp Walters wrote:
> Well, there's 3 main ways you can go: Quicktime, Windows MediaPlayer, and
> Flash. Windows MediaPlayer, which should be installed in all Windows
> computers, supports MPEG, but only the later versions support the MPEG4
> format.

Many of these installs are in hospitals, where IT staff is very 
restrictive of what gets installed.  We cannot rely on Flash being 
present any more than we can expect them to install QT, and adding the 
second extra layer of the browser just to play a movie seems an overkill.

Looks like no matter which way we go we're going to have to put someone 
in the Please Install One More Thing ghetto.

For this app our user demographic closely parallels global adoption, 
with most of our customers using XP, some Vista, and a few OS X.

So if we're going to have to inconvenience at least one of these groups, 
I'm inclined to just go with WMV, making the few OS X customers we have 
install Flip4Mac while everyone else gets native playback of a format 
with reasonably good quality and compression right out of the box.


> I would've thought one of the supported export formats for QT is MPEG, but
> you are correct, it appears it is not. Probably because MPEG is such a
> crappy format, and there are those which render much better and faster.

MPEG-1 was fairly crappy, but MPEG-2 is pretty good; in fact it's 
driving most of the video world at the moment.

But alas as an Apple customer, even though I've already paid them for QT 
Player Pro they expect me to pay them a second time just for the MPEG-2 
codec.  I might be willing to be nickel-and-dimed this way if I had some 
indication that MPEG-2 will work well with the default XP install.  Do 
you know if that's the case?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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