IMove loads completely before playing on Homepage

Question

I have a perplexing problem.
I just created a 20 minute iMovie that I put on my .Mac Homepage.
To do that, I saved it as a Quicktime file with the settings of 12
frames per second and the size of 240x180 and put it in the Movies
folder of my iDisk account.
So I've done all the stuff on my Homepage to publish it, but when I
try to view the movie when I use the URL for it, it takes forever to
load. I timed it this afternoon at 3 and a half minutes before it
would start playing. So I thought it might be taking so long because
the file was so large at 50 MB. But I have another movie on my
Homepage that's 30 MB, and it loads and starts playing instantly.
I noticed that the one that plays right away continues to load as
it's playing, but this new one seems to want to completely load
before it starts playing. I've tried looking for settings to see if
I had set something different, but I don't see any settings for the
Homepage, and nothing either in iMovie.
Does anybody have an idea what might be happening?
iMac   Mac OS X (10.4.3)   1 gb ram

Answer 1

Well, Karl, thanks for your tips about what you did with the original ..I'll try that too.
Meanwhile - while Discussions was down earlier today - I took the original (..the blockiness came from the original compression with QT 6.5.2, I think..) and played it in QT7 and then just clicked 'Share', and QT offered to set it up as 'Automatic' - which meant shrinking it down to 240x180 (from 320x240) which would produce a file size of 10.4MB instead of 41.1MB.
So I let it do that, and let it directly upload it to my Homepage ..whereas previously I'd 'Exported', put the exported file in my Desktop iDisk, then sync'ed the iDisk to dotMac and manually created a movie page..
Anyway: it 'Shared' it straight to my dotMac Homepage, where I selected a 'Frameless Black (Large)' blank page, thinking that by putting it in a 'Large' page that would expand the size from teeny 240x180 to something larger ..which it did.
But the expansion to a larger size makes it rather less sharp and lowers the apparent resolution. That's because it was encoded with the old QT 6.5.2 codec, not the more advanced, scalable H.264 codec of QuickTime 7. And when seen with QT 6.5.2, some of the black borders on the page, intended to automatically pad out the 4x3 aspect ratio to a possible 16x9 shape, don't meet the edge of the movie itself, so there are white bands at the left and right of the movie. When seen with QT7, the page's black edges do correctly fill to the 4:3 ratio so that there's black all around the edges of the movie.
[..Because it was originally "manufactured" with QT 6.5.2, this movie's visible when using either QT 7 OR earlier versions of QuickTime on your Mac..]
I then uploaded - I mean 'Shared' - it also to a 'Frameless (Black)' page which wasn't called 'Large', so it's in the actual 240x180 size and shape which QT 7 prepared, and both QT 6.5.2 and QT 7.0.3 correctly play it back as 4:3 - with black going right to the very edges of the movie, and the 'native' resolution's nice and sharp.
Both of these load and start playing almost instantly, on my fast broadband connection.
So what I draw from this is that:
(a) Smallest useful filesize makes the movie load and play far faster;
(b) Use 'Share' to send a movie to a Homepage, accepting Apple's default values, to package it so that it loads and plays at its optimum speed, without needing to specify 'Fast Start' or 'Hinted' or whatever;
(c) Choose the appropriately specified page for the relevant aspect ratio of the movie ('normal' for 4:3, 'large' for 16:9 or HD);
(d) 'Creating' the movie in QT 6.5.2 gives slightly lower resolution and blockier artifacts than using QT7's H.264 codec, but allows everyone to view it ..and nothing of that is altered by using QT7 to 'Share' or upload it.
The 'large' version is here, and looks a bit unsharp, as it's been 'magnified', and will have white edges if you're viewing it with a QuickTime version earlier than 7.
The 'normal', un-enlarged version is here, and looks OK in both QT 6 and QT 7, but is rather small, and therefore loses some impact.
But both of them load and play pretty much instantly on a fast connection!
[..Finally: the source of all this was a cable TV programme about films: 'America's Greatest Love Stories' ..which I recorded on a TiVo in MPEG format; then played it out of the TiVo and into an Archos Video Jukebox (..predecessor of a Video iPod, but which includes its own excellent hardwired codec..) in DivX format; FireWired it across from the Archos' hard disc into my old PowerBook running 10.3.9 (..as there's no DivX codec for 10.4 yet..) and into QuickTime 6.5.2; then uploaded that using QT 7 on another PowerBook. And yet it's survived, and most of it looks, and sounds, great ..though rather small, and with less impact now. But I find it incredible that it survived all that so well!..]
P.S: I could watch it forever, couldn't you?..