Preparing your movies for QT streaming.

Movies can be shared over the web in one of two ways, by traditional HTTP or using Streaming (RTSP). Both methods are referred to as streaming but RTSP is the most efficient. Here's the short course on how to prepare your movies for RTSP streaming. See the Apple references for the full details... (We are not supporting Real or Windows media streaming.)

  1. Crunch your movie in Media Cleaner Pro or Media Cleaner EZ (free with FinalCut Pro).
  2. Save as a hinted movie
  3. Send the movie to the webmaster, drop it via FTP, or send on disc. Call for details.
  4. You need to create a reference or poster movie as a placeholder for the movie within the web page. This can be a single still image that you open and save as a .mov in QuickTime Pro.
  5. Write your web page with an EMBED tag where you want the movie to play. Here's a sample:
  6. <EMBED src="posterimage.mov" height="xxx" width="xxx" controller="FALSE" AUTOPLAY="FALSE" href="http://imagine.guhsd.net/school_name/movie_name.mov">


The src is your poster movie. The href is the movie to be streamed. You can add or delete your own attributes such as whether or not a control bar is displayed or not. If you want to pop the movie up in a QT Player window, add the attribute target="quicktimeplayer". Using this latter method will require some folks to set their QuickTime Player stream prefs to RTSP/UDP. For simplicity, stick to browser window playback.

Have at it!

References:
Apple Quicktime RTSP streaming intro
Hinting a movie with QT Pro
Saving movies for alternative data rates