UK Register article: RNWK vs. AAPL
>Apple has two key weapons to take to the fight with Real. First,
there's image quality. Apple has been working on QuickTime for
rather longer than Real has been developing its own software,
and its core playback technology, with its support for numerous
compression standards, video and animation formats, and
performance tweaks, give QuickTime a real edge here.
That's the advantage of leveraging a video technology into
streaming, rather than the other way round. Real has focused its
efforts on getting the streaming to work in low-bandwidth
environments -- as bandwidth has increased, it's had more time
to devote to improving the playback quality. Apple, on the other
hand, has got the quality off pat and has been able to sit and
wait for the bandwidth to catch up.
To use that bandwith, Apple has based QuickTime 4.0's
streaming facilities on two standard protocols, RTP (Real Time
Protocol) and RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol). There are
some important technological issues here that may act against
Apple -- both protocols aren't designed to operate across
firewalls and have problems with networks that share a single IP
address through a shared modem -- and lack the fine-tuning you
get with a proprietary technology like Real's G2.<
theregister.co.uk
cc. SI/RNWK |
