In order to search for QuickTime movies I first had to switch from Firefox to Internet Explorer. For some reason I can’t get Firefox to recognize that I have QuickTime installed and it asks to me install it every time I try to play something that uses QuickTime. I’ve tried reinstalling it a couple times and still no luck. So now whenever I want to watch a QuickTime movie I open IE. Which was why I found it humorous that while exploring the QuickTime site it said QuickTime has trouble sometimes playing on IE and recommended using a different browser.
While the QuickTime site has an extensive selection of samples of HD video, when I went to the sites for some of the video (such as BBC) it looked like it was Flash. To make things more confusing I found some vague information that sounded like Flash will stream QuickTime format – so does that mean that even though it’s in a Flash player I’m actually watching QuickTime video?
After watching a few HD video clips it was difficult to go back to the regular clips (even though my computer couldn’t really handle the HD clips and kept pausing to buffer). I finally did find a neat blog post on how to embed QuickTime files with a WordPress plug-in. The video that was shown on the blog as a sample looked really clean and played right away. It was also nice to have the clip right on the screen. If I was watching something that was really long I would want it to play in a player, but with something so short it’s much more convenient for the file to be embedded.
Granted, it was a short clip, but it seems like QuickTime is a good platform for video on the web. But it seems so complicated to embed QuickTime on web pages. The file is also larger than most of the files I’ve downloaded at 2 MB so it seems like with longer videos that would slow the time it took for the video to load. I’ve also noticed that QuickTime buttons sometimes don’t work so well on my computer. For example, the volume button on the embedded blog video was a click and drag rather than a click, release, move the button. Also when I was playing some of the HD video the pause button would stop working occasionally. And when I paused and navigated away from the page and came back, the video would start playing again automatically.
Digital Media 