[thelist] all questions QuickTime

Bird bird at koolfish.com
Tue Oct 26 09:33:06 CDT 2004


I have inherited a site and I have been given a huge QuickTime movie by
the client. Its 10 MB in size. Its causing all kinds of problems to play
and I wonder as to the reasons why. Is it the size, the way its been
saved or my code of how I have embedded it in the page? If anyone could
answer any of the following questions or suggest improvements that would
be a great help.

1. The movie will only play if you have the latest QuickTime plug-in. It
won't play on say version 5. Shouldn't the movie be backwards
compatible? When I tried to play it with version 5 I got an error of bad
movie atom that I could never find any information about, yet it will
play fine with version 6.5

2. As its so big I presume it will only play well on high speed
connections. Is that assumption correct? People using slower dial up
connections have reported that it either does not play, is intermittent
or won't play the sound.

3. When I first made the pages it played correctly on both IE and
Netscape. Now it will not even load on two of my machines in the
Netscape 6 or 7. The QuickTime icon fails to appear. Why would this be
so? I have not changed any settings. I thought QuickTime was part of
Netscape as a default download. I tested Netscape on the apple site to
see if it would play their movies and it does so why is it now failing
with mine?

4. In Opera, the movie won't play because it prompts me saying I need to
download the latest plug-in from Apple when I already have it installed
on my machine. How can I get round that?

5. Is there any way that I can make the movie smaller in size? What
software would I need? The client doesn't seem able to get in touch with
the original person who made the movie. As well as size in MB the actual
dimensions of the movie are huge. If you are viewing at 800 x 600 it
causes a scroll. Can I alter that any way? 

6. According to our stats on visitors to the site. Over 94% are viewing
using IE. Should this movie really be available in another format than
QuickTime such as RealPlayer or Windows Media player? To convert the
movie I presume the original movie maker needs to resave the file. Is
that correct? What movie format would you suggest would be the best?

7. Some sites have options where its for dialup and for high speed. What
would be the differences in these files? How would i make them?

If anyone has any other snippets of information that they may find
helpful please chip in. I read the apple site but really only gleamed
how to embed the movie.

The movie can be seen (or not seen!) here:
http://www.okonjima.com/site/okonjimamovie.html

Thanks for any help to any of these questions

Lisa



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