You prefer online stream flash/quicktime or download?

[Morne]

Hi all

When viewing animations online in a portfolio or a reel, do you like to view it online (bad if you don't have the bandwidth) or just prefer downloading the clip and playing it from your hdd?

If you prefer online, do you prefer flash or quicktime? Can you get the same high quality with both? Personally my bandwidth sucks so it's useless and also irretating for me to sit and wait while a movie buffers/streams and half the time it times out in the middle. For me it is better to download and then view it, however I would prefer to have a faster connection and just view it online. My connection is only 384 DSL and it's good for most things, but not online viewing.

How do you guys feel about it?


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[Da_elf]

i kinda got used to using flash now

[jujubee]

Quicktime seems to provide the best quality but people don't always have that installed. Plus, it's quite buggy on Windows X64.

Flash, everyone seems to have and streams rather fast but quality is more suck. I stream Flash from my site with a note that it's not representative of final quality.

Windows Media Format is pretty good and files are relatively small. I've sent the other formats to one of my clients that had tight security and they were unable to display those formats. The only one they could view was Windows Media... However, I'm not sure how well WMV plays on non-Windows based machines...

[plastic_]

for embedded videos, flash only please!

the codec is the same (H.264?)
since flash player 9, i think. Previously is was lower quality, but in these days everything is the same mpeg4 stuff, including quicktime.
so quality should be the same, if it's encoded properly.

as jujubee mentioned, quicktime is broken on windows/vista 64 (no transport bar) , and most windows systems can't play quicktime movies at all. (pretty much only ipod/iphone owners and gfx people)

I can't stand websites that expect the user to have some obscure plugin installed, I'd never install a plugin for a website, no matter how interesting the content might be.

Flash is a plugin too, but it's default, it's really on every computer, there is no way around it, at least until html5 gets used, with native embedded videos.

For videos to download, I'd give the user the choice between quicktime, windows media and xvid avi.

[Undersky]

at least until html5 gets used, with native embedded videos

Which they won't I'm afraid. Firefox added the <video> tagg and everything, but it seems Apple put a stop on ogg embeded video in the standard. http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online...Video-Standard

I'd like to say Flash video for embedded video, but since Firefox (which is my main browser) just gets worse and worse at handling it, I'm starting to hesitate. If you have the space on your server, offer both Flash and Quicktime and let the user choose.

[Neilg]

I prefer flash embedded, quicktime download.

Flash downloads suck, and quicktime embedded crashes my browser. (any page with a quicktime file on, explorer.exe dies before I even know about it)