Including QuickTime Movies In A Web Page

Including QuickTime Movies In A Web Page

Now that you've finished compressing your movie, you can deploy it to the web.

QuickTime movies can be included in a web page allowing visitors to your website to experience media seamlessly inside their browser. This is accomplished by adding some HTML to your web page that tells the QuickTime browser plug-in to display the media. See the Including QuickTime In A Web Page Tutorial to learn more.

Specifying Multiple Movie Targets using Reference Movies

If you have more than one target, you should compress your movie more than once. Compressing multiple versions of a movie takes time, and posting multiple versions uses disk space. But it makes a better experience for your users. If you can spend the time and have the space, compress different versions and target them using what is called a reference movie.

A reference movie contains pointers to alternate data rate movies--that is, multiple versions of the movie designed for downloading at various data rates. These alternate data rate movies do not typically all reside in the same reference movie file (although you may optionally "flatten" any of these movies into the reference movie so that they are all contained within the same file); any others are included by reference only.

For example, a QuickTime movie can contain a list of references to movies having different data rates, allowing an application to choose the best-looking movie that can play smoothly as it downloads over the Internet, based on the user’s connection speed.

Here's an example: to target iPod Touch and iPhone over EDGE/Wi-Fi you could create two versions of your movie with different data rates as shown in Table 10 and then create a reference movie that targets them based on connection speed:

Table 10  Creating Multiple Versions of a Movie to target iPod Touch and iPhone over EDGE/Wi-Fi.

Movie Size	Device	Total Bit Rate
400 X 225	iPhone/iPod Touch over Wi-Fi	714kb
400 X 225	iPhone over EDGE	112kb

You can use the MakeRefMovie tool to create a reference movie.

See the Reference Movies Tutorial to learn how to use the MakeRefMovie tool to create a reference movie.

The alternative is to optimize compression for one delivery medium at the expense of the others; you can compress for delivery over a slow connection, for example, with lower quality than you could provide to people with faster connections, and let people with slower connections wait a bit longer to see the movie. Some people would rather wait however long it takes to get the best-quality movie, so if you use alternate movies, you might want to include a way for people to download the high-bandwidth version, regardless of their connection speed.

For example, when targeting Apple TV you can provide a separate download to allow users to get the high bandwidth version of your movie as shown here:

Table 11  Movie Download for Apple TV.

Movie Size	Device	Total Bit Rate
1280 X 720	Apple TV HD	5Mb

Here's the download for iPod:

Table 12  Movie Download for iPod.

Movie Size	Device	Total Bit Rate
640 X 480	iPod	1.5 MB