Quicktime movies are often in the form of simple videoclips, using a timleline-based video track and possibly, an audio track. We use such timeline based movies as fast start and streaming movies. Quicktime moves can, however, also reresent virtual reality animations, 3d tracks, text based presentations and above all, interactive movies (wired movies with sprites) which also may use vector animations. All such types of movies you may find on this web page. An example for a 3d-track movie is rotating just right above. If this is spinning, you should have the right plugin.
Fast start movies will be fully downloaded to your harddisk, but start playing already once a certain amount of the video has been downloaded. According to your connection speed the movie may play smoothly already during download or may stutter. In the latter case, allow complete download and then play only. Fast start thus allows you previews, and you may interrupt download if the movie is of no interest for you. Fast start movies also allow to deliver high quality video over slower connections (you just have to wait for complete download).
Realtime Streaming movies are not downloaded to your disk while playing. Only the amount necessary for a stream is delivered at any given time. Streaming movies could therefore be watched for hours, without ever clogging your harddisk. Also, live broadcast is possible with the streaming technology. We use the Apple Quicktime Streaming Server running under MacOS X-Serversoftware.
The bad news is that if your bandwith is narrow, or narrows during broadcast, the quality of the film will automatically drop down, until you eventually just see blurred squares. So the quality of a streaming film depends on your internet connection rather than on the film itself.
Streaming movies are however, especially useful if the user want's to jump further back or forth in the film. Changing the playhead of a film will just shift streaming to the new position.
Quicktime streaming uses the so-called rtsp-protocol (not the http-protocol) and needs a dedicated Quicktime streaming server. If you cannot see any streaming content, please use our help & faq page.
Quicktime contents need the quicktime plugin in order to be presented on web pages. Some other plugins (such as Windows media player) may try to present quicktime contents, but will fail in most cases, particularly in interactive quicktimes and virtual reality quicktimes. This is why you should check our plugin page so that you'll have the right quicktime plugin installed and see all contents of this site.
