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QuickTime 4 is Apple's latest streaming media platform. Although it doesn't measure up to the Microsoft and RealNetworks offerings, Mac users and those who want certain specific functions will find it a compelling solution.

Apple's package features the QuickTime Pro player/encoder and a recently overhauled Streaming Server platform. To stream QuickTime from a Macintosh server, you use QuickTime Streaming Server 2.0.1 running on the $500 Mac OS X, Apple's new open—standards—based operating system. You can also stream QuickTime from other operating systems, including FreeBSD, Red Hat Linux, Solaris, and Windows NT and 2000, using the Darwin Streaming Server, which is available for free under Apple's public-source license. Though QuickTime 3 supported only HTTP streaming, Apple has added RTP and RTSP protocols to QuickTime 4, enabling true, real-time streaming.

On the upside, setup and installation of the server software—even under Windows NT and 2000—is painless and quick. On the downside, Streaming Server 2.0.1 cannot compete with Microsoft or Real's solutions in terms of features and manageability. QuickTime Streaming Server's management options are restricted to managing overall bandwidth throughput and limiting the maximum number of connections to the server. According to Apple, QuickTime Streaming Server 2.0.1 can handle up to 2,000 simultaneous streams and requires a Power Mac G3 with at least 128MB of RAM to operate smoothly. The authentication support is helpful if security is a concern, but it's no match for the extensive security and access control offerings of the other products.

What makes Streaming Server a viable alternative to the Microsoft and RealNetworks solutions? First, Apple has been a pioneer in multimedia graphics design, and it enjoys a much stronger base in the design community. QuickTime's virtual reality engine enables designers to develop unmatched virtual walkthroughs and product presentations. Also, if you are a native Apple shop and want to enter the streaming media business on a scale that does not require features exclusive to Microsoft or Real, QuickTime will integrate into your network far more easily.

On the content creation side, Apple's QuickTime Pro demonstrates how well editing, encoding, and playing can be integrated into one application. For $29.99, you can unlock the code enhancements in the free QuickTime 4.1.2 player and convert it to QuickTime Pro, giving you access to encoding abilities.

Editing and encoding in QuickTime Pro is a breeze—if you know what you're doing. Time-line editing with copy and paste support in multiple player windows is one of the biggest advantages of Apple's package. You can extract tracks, add tracks, even isolate the audio or video from a file. Although QuickTime provides some encoding assistance and lets you choose target audience settings from a drop-down list, small miscalculations can have large consequences. We found that even with the wizards, the margin between desirable and horrifying results—such as impractically large files—is slim.

On the other hand, one of QuickTime's definite advantages is the variety of formats it supports. Audio, video, text, VR, 3-D, Flash, MIDI, and even MP3 are only a few examples from a page-long list of supported file formats.

The Fast Start setting encodes your content into a file for HTTP Web server streaming; the Hinted setting lets you serve the file using the RTSP protocol on your streaming server. As with all of the reviewed products, you can embed the player into your HTML code.

Among the three solutions we reviewed, we were least impressed with QuickTime's output quality. And without the aid of third-party quality-enhancement tools, QuickTime can't match Microsoft or Real's overall output quality on high—and low—bandwidth selections. 

Copyright ?? 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.