User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Windows/20050923)
When it comes to being able to deliver content created in a codec
format, Windows Media and ISO standards are about even in terms of cross
platform capability. Windows Media and ISO standards (MPEG4, AAC,
H.264) will play on Macs, Windows and Linux machines. However, most
users will have to install something. The exceptions are Windows Media
is standard on Windows based computers which dominate the market and QT
is standard on OSX machines which have a single digit (but growing)
market share. Corporate desktops are usually Windows based and are
often locked down so the users are prevented from installing any
software that is not blessed by IT. So Windows computers have to add
QT, OSX users add a plug in and Linux users struggle to compile Xine,
Mplayer or pick a distro that includes these all ready (or have a distro
that supports the VLC binary).
In theory, if you are streaming consumer content, you could eliminate
the corporate desktop from the market share equation which would greatly
change the market share percentages of each player. In that case, 42
million iPods have all driven QT on the desktop of the users computer.
However, you are making a poor argument to try and convince someone to
stream QuickTime. QuickTime is a wrapper that contains codecs. While
it is a bit of a semantical argument, the QT player is NOT available on
Linux or Solaris but you can play certain QT codecs on Linux. Therefor,
if you are trying to convince a client with consumer oriented content to
not use Windows Media, the better argument, in my opinion, is to
convince them to stream ISO standards which may be easily played on all
virtually all computers. These ISO standards stream from a Darwin
server under RTSP and play inside players readily available for almost
any OS. But, if your client is looking to stream business oriented
content than Windows Media will be hard to sell against due to the
managed desktop situation in corporate environments.
Now if Apple made a Linux QT player......
Ray
Paul Libbrecht wrote:
I'd be ten thousand times more positive here: the normal radio station
company tended to say "oh sure we chose Windows Media Player because
it plays cross-platform"... forgetting about fancy linuxes and many
others... Now they cannot say this anymore and I really feel this is
good, they will finally consider using something standard if wishing
to be cross-platform, at least so I hope (e.g. MP3, OGG,...).
