The QuickTime Live! Keynote Address

delivered by Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior VP for Worldwide Marketing, focused on QuickTime 5 as we expected. He first mentioned that more than 100 million copies of QuickTime 4 have been distributed. Here is Apple's press release.

Seven new features in QuickTime 5 were mentioned in a near perfect web cast yesterday from about 1:40p to 3p ET. The new features are:

1. A new user interface (UI) that is Aqua-like, has an audio slider rather than audio wheel and a TV button that shows channels in the viewer rather than in a pull down tray.

2. The UI accepts third party "skins" so the UI can be customized in a variety of configurations like SoundJam for example.

3. Hot Picks Movies obtained through a single click (the demo didn't work).

4. New Codecs (Sorenson 3, Flash 4, SHOUTcast, Cubic VR [up and down as well as around], and MPEG1 with streaming support).

5. New DV Codecs.

6. Component Downloader, basically third party Codecs kept on Apple's server and downloaded when needed like plug-ins. A pay per view concert was demoed.

7. Skip Protection, basically buffering to get past internet interruptions for a smooth stream. Demoed by unplugging the internet connection.

The Mac version of QuickTime 5 Preview Release is now available for download and beta testing. Also available is a Preview Release of Mac OS Streaming Server 3.

We downloaded QT5PR and installed it on a Power Mac G4 (AGP), PowerBook (FireWire) and iMac 350 SL. All three computers had QT4 Pro v4.1.2 installed. In each case, QT5's installer created a new QuickTime folder in the Applications folder, overwrote the existing QT4 extensions in the System folder and installed new extensions (7 extensions and a folder with a bunch more) and on restart gave an error message that not all QT resources were enabled because some were out of date. Clicking replace them now resulted in another error message that the sever wasn't available. The messages reappear with every restart. Even more disconcerting, Extensions Manager quits with a Type 2 error until the QT5 extensions are removed from the system folder of both the G4 and PowerBook. Dana Baggett reports no problem with Extensions Manager on his iMac. Weird!

The QT Setting control panel is new, with more choices for internet connection speeds. Despite the problems, QT5PR seemed to work fine and the new interface is definitely an approvement. [Dana Baggett]