Quicktime: use streaming or http?

January 4, 2007 12:05 PM

Quicktime question. I have a number of artist video files to play on a gallery website. They range in file size from 800k to 21meg (the largest). Should I use QT streaming server or just regular http? What are the benefits/drawbacks of each?
posted by media_itoku to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Unless you are expecting high traffic, and bandwidth is not that much of an issue, and you don't mind a user being able to simply save the movie to disk, then serving them via HTTP is suitable.

Anything more advanced would probably warrant a streaming server.
posted by adzm at 5:33 PM on January 4, 2007

I can't think of any reason why you should not use HTTP, unless you want to make it harder for them to save the clips for offline viewing, which is an assholic kind of thing to do, in my humble opinion. I mean, all the major sites like apple.com use HTTP, if you need some kind of validation. And using standard HTTP means you don't have to worry about people behind restrictive corporate/university/enterprise firewalls.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:25 PM on January 4, 2007