Quicktime Broadcaster impressions?
 

We have done some live webcasts in the past using Realnetworks broadcasting tool and were somewhat disappointed.

We now have an Apple dual G5 box, and I'm wondering if anyone has used Quicktime Broadcaster for doing real time netcasting, and what your impressions were?

Thanks.

Joe Kras
St. Louis, MO USA

I don't think many (if any) people here have experience with this
kind of setup. Most here seem to just make and edit movies etc.

Don't know if you need to buy this software, but if you do perhaps
Apple has a demo version available for you to try to see how it
works?

Are you looking into serious (realtime) broadcasting of an event
or is just to host movies? If it is the latter you don't need
something like QT Broadcaster. You can just export a QuickTime
movie from whatever you use to edit and put that up on a website
like for example your Mac homepage etc.

Good luck!

Thanks for the reply, Rob.

I'm thinking of using it for a live broadcast of a conference.

The software is free. I've downloaded it, and gotten it to recognize a camera, but haven't played quite figured out how to actually get it to broadcast yet (too busy with other things, like learning how to get consistent DVD output on a Mac).

I'll play around with it a bit more when I get a chance. Just thought I'd get some opinions of others so I wouldn't waste time if it was a dog.

Thanks again.

Joe Kras

I've done what you describe wanting to do. That is, I've installed it and broadcast a stream on my intranet. There are step by step instructions (in the HELP) on how to set up the broadcast and invite other computers to join. I've used it to go point to point as well as to a QuickTime Streaming server that was came with my OS X server.

Thanks, Ernest.

Don't know what I did wrong the first time, but I'll go back and give it a go again, paying closer attention to the instructions.

Was the picture of fairly good quality (good enough to project) and did you experience much lag time?

Joe

You can judge the image quality yourself by setting it up with a firewire camera and record your broadcast. You get to decide the compression parameters so the resulting video is affected by the performance of your system. I think I had best results with the MJPEG compressor at 24FPS. There was a subsecond delay between transmission and reception but your mileage will vary.

Thanks again for your reply.

I tend to get very aggravated with people that don't want to do the simplest research and homework themselves on discussion boards, so I'll stop here before I get aggravated at myself. :)

Joe