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QuickTime

How to Hint a QuickTime Movie

Summary

Before you can stream a QuickTime movie you must "hint" it. This guide describes how to hint an existing QuickTime movie using QuickTime Player Pro so that it can be streamed by a QuickTime Streaming Server™.

According to Apple, hinting a QuickTime movie "involves analyzing the media data within a movie and creating hint tracks which tell the streaming server software how to package the data to send over the network." This hinting process "offloads computation-intensive operations from the streaming server" and therefore "simplifies the server operation and permits it to serve more content."

Instructions

Note: The following instructions require QuickTime Pro for mac.

To hint an existing QuickTime movie, begin by opening your movie in the QuickTime Player:

  1. Open the Pro version of QuickTime Player.

  2. On the File menu, select Open Movie... An Open dialogue box should appear.

  3. Use the Open dialogue box to locate your QuickTime movie.

  4. Once your movie has been selected, click the Open button.

Now export your movie as a hinted QuickTime Streaming movie:

  1. On the file menu, select Export. An Export dialogue box should appear.

  2. Click the box labelled Export and from the resulting menu select Movie to QuickTime Movie.

  3. Click the box labelled Use and from the resulting menu select your target bitrate and audio quality.

  4. Click Options and select the "Prepare for Internet Streaming" checkbox.

  5. Choose Hinted Streaming from the pop-up menu and click OK.

  6. Click the Export button.

Please refer to Apple's Preparing movies for Internet delivery for more thorough information on hinting.