Is The QuickTime Plugin Still Relevant Online?
Friday, December 11, 2009 at 9:47AM 
Seen this lately?We all know that love it, or hate it, Flash is the video format of choice for video sharing sites like YouTube. Of course, that's not entirely accurate since more and more files are really h.264 or MPEG-4, wrapped in flash. So when we say flash is the "format" of choice, we really mean flash is the required player of choice.
What about Quicktime as the player of choice? Five or ten years ago, it looked like QuickTime, Real Player, and Windows Media would slug it out for online dominance. Now, for better or worse, we've all more or less agreed that h.264 is the codec du jour, and if you want to allow users to put annoying captions over it, or need to pay the bills with video ads, then you'll wrap in something requiring a flash player.
When's the last time you encountered a site that had content designed to play back in the browser through the QuickTime plugin? There are three places where this still seems to happen: 1. The Apple Website (although this is now more html 5, embedded video-driven), education sites (usually neglected ones), and motion graphics / video editors demo reels, generally to showcase the quality of their product.
Is anyone out there embedding video for QuickTime playback exclusively? Have third party players/hosting sites made the concept of hosting your own video obsolete?
Apple, Quicktime, plugin, windows media Permalink
Reader Comments (1)
Compare QuickTime's streaming capabilities to Windows Media Player (poor) or Flash (none). And how telling is it that video and digital media specialists (like myself) choose to present our work through QuickTime, to ensure quality of delivery. Flash would still look like crap without H.264, which Apple brought to market first as part of MPEG-4 in QuickTime. As with most good technology: get it from Apple first, or wait for the rest of the crowd (including Microsoft and Adobe) to get it later.