Following last weeks release of QuickTime 4.0, Apple is stepping up its campaign against RealNetworks and Microsoft’s new media player for a slice of the streaming market. In true “open-source” fashion, they are publishing the underlying code for a QuickTime server that supports

up to 1,000 simultaneous video streams, can play back a wide variety of multimedia formats including MP3, Macromedia Flash, FlashPix, avi and wav files.

The QuickTime server is “the first based on the Internet Engineering Task Force’s real-time streaming protocol open standard,” according to Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president of product marketing.

All you need is an Apple X Server, ha, ha, there’s the catch, but Apple is confident it is going to be a success as the majority of RealNetworks’ proprietary video is produced in QuickTime and then converted. The quality apparently “shines” over RealVideo, but we haven’t fully tried and tested it yet, so they might be fibing. RealNetworks told us G2 would would be 80% better than 5.0 and we   believed them, suckers.

At the other end of the free stream market comes the Free Expression Project, a refreshly indepedent attempt to provide something practical in this freefall fest of frantic freeware.

For both the Free Expression Project, a primary motivation in developing open-source alternatives to RealNetworks products is to wrest control of  the technology from Real. “My original goal in starting this was my interest in free speech issues,” said Free Expression Project founder Lynn Winebarger, a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at Indiana University. “It’s a great way to help people distribute their    content to other people without being beholden to any corporation. I think the only way to ensure freedom of expression in this area is having the distribution medium held in the public trust.”

http://www.publicsource.apple.com/

http://www.free-expression.org/