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I’ve always been a big fan of QuickTime. It is arguably the greatest contribution that Apple has made to computing outside of the hardware. Often misunderstood as simply a way to show video, it’s so much more. QuickTime holds all sorts of rich media content from stills to video to sound to panoramas to all sorts of interactive possibilities. While the official, full release of QuickTime 6 is still being delayed due to licensing issues related to MPEG-4, the preview release is out and from the little bit of playing that I’ve been able to do I’m very impressed. Streaming audio and video are fast and the quality is great…and it follows standards. The other thing that is out in preview is QuickTime Broadcaster, which allows you to broadcast MPEG-4 video and audio with any machine running OS X with a FireWire device for input. Combine that with the free QuickTime Streaming Server and you’ve got a pretty cheap internet broadcasting solution. I’ll have a better idea of how it will work for me when I compress some files and see how it looks and sounds.
