I’ve got to write this down so I don’t forget. I spent a bunch of time trying to decipher how to get streaming video on a webpage. It turned out to be relatively simple, once you know the path to follow. It was just tough finding the path. Here’s an example of what follows. The example you see there shows a mov file on amy.pintglass.org. The trick is that the actual movie that plays is located elsewhere on a streaming server. The mov file that you see on the example page is called a Quicktime Media Link. If you download that mov file, rename it to a txt extension and view it in a text editor, you’ll see where the real file resides.

Here’s how to make it work:

1) Once your video is created, take a screenshot for the “poster”
2) Save the video again (using Quicktime Pro) as a “hinted” video. Be sure to pay attention to the size– 320×240 is perfect for the web.
3) Upload the hinted version to your Quicktime server. This is a special deal–not all servers are set up to stream Quicktime. Make sure yours is (ask your webhost, not me).
4) Make a Quicktime Media Link for the version that is on the server. This means pointing Quicktime at the server and running that file, then exporting it as the Media link (qtl file extension).
5) Upload the qtl file to any server you like, then rename the extension to mov.
6) Use vPIP to get the video on the page. Point to the media link, not the actual video on the streaming server.

Done!

Step four can be circumvented by simply creating a new text file that looks something like this (use angle brackets instead of the square brackets you see here):

[?xml version="1.0"?]
[?quicktime type="application/x-quicktime-media-link"?]

Using Quicktime to make the link is another hoop to jump through, but you actually get a few more options (autoplay, show controls, etc…) that you can mess around with. The code above is the basic thing, though. Just make a text file with that (replacing with your actual server and file, of course) then rename the file to a mov extension.