Quicktime... To hint or not to hint...????

Question

Ok, could someone please help me. I am an 3d animator and am trying to workout how I can have my animations streaming on my site..
Here is what i have tried/done so far..
I have activated my quicktime streaming server on my Dream host webspace which in turn has created a new streaming folder on my server.
I have brought quicktime pro and have created (a number of attempts) of hinted versions of my videos (originally exported from After Effects as quicktimes)
I have tried uploading these hint movs to my newly created streaming folder which they seem to have done and appear in the folder. I tried to test this however using open url function from the file menu in quicktime pro and I have not been able to get it to connect coming up with a "not found" message. I may well be using the wrong url link tho...
Finally last night I downloaded a copy of MakeRefMovie tool and tried creating a ref of this hinted movie.. this created a random file that i uploaded to my server...
Now im just mega confused about what to do.
Has anyone done this any managed to get it working???
If so please help!!!?!?
Jay

Answer 1

Hinting will, unless something's very amiss, not have anything to do with a "file not found" problem. Hinting improves playback performance when streaming content, but will not affect the file not being found at all unless you failed to hint the movie; movies intended for streaming must be hinted. I don't remember if a non-hinted movie would generate a "file not found" error or would just not play. If you need assistance with hinting, this tutorial may help:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/hinttracks.html
Most likely you're not using the correct URL or don't have the file correctly placed on the streaming server. Normally the URL would be:
rtsp://yourservername/moviename.mov
though you may have a longer URL if you've created folders within the default folder on the streaming server.
Reference movies are useful when you want to embed a link on a web page to launch the stream, or need to have multiple data rates to serve clients on Internet connections of different bandwidth. Here's a tutorial on reference movies that you might find useful:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/refmovies.html
Hope this helps.
Message was edited by: Dave Sawyer