Macquarie University
In the examples above the server is running QT Streaming Server software, now avaiable on 3 platforms. What loads when you first open this page is a QuickTime link or pointer (a Reference File) to the streaming file.
- With streaming QT the client does not download the files so there is no copy of these files on the client computer. Very useful for delivery of copyright material and for not clogging up the client hard drive with large movie files
- The streamed files can be started at any position you move the cursor to, or they can contain a text indexing system for searching. However large the file is, a half hour lecture for example, the client can start where they wish
- Streaming servers can also serve live QT files, files being sent to the server as they are "recorded", in effect a new broadcast system
- All you need to run such a server is a fast computer with lots of disk space! At the time of writing hard disk costs are around $10 a gig and still heading down.
- Streamed or "hinted" QuickTime files use Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) and the reference files (which are less than 1K in size) contain the address as this cannot be directly accessed from a web page
- To make a "hinted" file from any sound file you need QuickTime Pro ($30) which comes with a vast array of conversions as well as a number of compression tools. The compression is normally in the order of 20 to 1 so there is a valuable saving in file size with little loss of quality
- QuickTime
Player can be used to access such files. The address for the example
above looks like this:
"rtsp://www.efs.mq.edu.au/eric/efs2.mov"