VickiOne quick question about Quicktime - my colleague said Quicktime is a
Bad Idea because the file sizes are big and it doesn't have a big
installed base... is this a good enough reason not to use it?
That's an opinion from a distinctly Windows perspective. It would be interesting to see your colleagues stats about this. Of course, WMV and the other MS formats will be more prolific as they are pre installed on most Intel/AMD boxes sold in the shops.
I personally can't see a difference between the two formats in file size. When you are on a broadband connection a couple of megs here and there doesn't matter. Of course that differs for dial-up users in the bush but in that case a media file may not be the best choice, a plain text alternative might be better.
If you run a *nix OS (like a Linux distro or Mac OSX) there are some good open source media players available - such as Xine [1] (and related frontends [2]) and Mplayer [3]. Both play media files regardless of format as long as the correct codecs are installed on the system. I can happily play WMV, ASF, AVI, MOV, QT, MPG2 3 and 4 etc etc in the same player. Both have closed captioning support and they are open source. So whether the manufacturers player for their format is installed or not on a system is a null argument in this regard.
As an aside there is a very interesting project at CSIRO (the Australian Government science and research organisation) called Annodex http://www.annodex.net/. It combines a media format with an XML based markup language called CMML. Very interesting reading.
[1] http://xinehq.de/index.php/features [2]http://xinehq.de/index.php/releases [3] http://www.mplayerhq.hu http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML-single/en/MPlayer.html#subosd
HTH
James
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