An avi supports more platforms at least...
But its huge. And looses video quality with compression. And doesn't let you slow down the game.
It also doesn't let you watch live games, although that's less attractive to people who don't know who the players are anyway.
It is however, piss easy. Just navigate there and click play. One demo!
Regarding an ocx control, presumably you could just create a blank window in there and start up a client rendering onto that window. In windows or x11, there is no requirement to own the parent window (who owns the root/desktop window?).
Firefox doesn't nativly support ocx controls though. So you'd need to implement it twice to cover all browsers. This is part of the reason why qtv works with .qtv files. Download and open the .qtv file and it'll load the client and automatically connect to the given stream. Just make the client appear windowed and its almost exactly the same effect.
The major problem is the game data. Again, with .qtv, a full client being loaded is a full client with the full gamedata required to draw it. Downloading that content for easy display in a browser is in 95% of cases illegal (quake's data is still under copyright). While requiring that the user sort out the gamedata in the case of a full client is a far more innocent aproach.
But more practically, requiring to set up the plugin just complicates matters, contrary to the idea of browser plugins where you can just go to a page and have it work.
Personally, I feel the gecko/netscape/firefox plugin api would be easier to work in to an already existing client than the (mostly) IE-only ocx api. Just need to compile it as a dll and abstract away some of the system specific code, then create an installer package.
Theoretically it wouldn't be too hard to do it. It would just take a lot of code. Its the practicality of it weighted against the simplicity of just having a client installed easily, that opens .qtv streams.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/ <- looks like a good place to start
But its huge. And looses video quality with compression. And doesn't let you slow down the game.
It also doesn't let you watch live games, although that's less attractive to people who don't know who the players are anyway.
It is however, piss easy. Just navigate there and click play. One demo!
Regarding an ocx control, presumably you could just create a blank window in there and start up a client rendering onto that window. In windows or x11, there is no requirement to own the parent window (who owns the root/desktop window?).
Firefox doesn't nativly support ocx controls though. So you'd need to implement it twice to cover all browsers. This is part of the reason why qtv works with .qtv files. Download and open the .qtv file and it'll load the client and automatically connect to the given stream. Just make the client appear windowed and its almost exactly the same effect.
The major problem is the game data. Again, with .qtv, a full client being loaded is a full client with the full gamedata required to draw it. Downloading that content for easy display in a browser is in 95% of cases illegal (quake's data is still under copyright). While requiring that the user sort out the gamedata in the case of a full client is a far more innocent aproach.
But more practically, requiring to set up the plugin just complicates matters, contrary to the idea of browser plugins where you can just go to a page and have it work.Personally, I feel the gecko/netscape/firefox plugin api would be easier to work in to an already existing client than the (mostly) IE-only ocx api. Just need to compile it as a dll and abstract away some of the system specific code, then create an installer package.
Theoretically it wouldn't be too hard to do it. It would just take a lot of code. Its the practicality of it weighted against the simplicity of just having a client installed easily, that opens .qtv streams.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/ <- looks like a good place to start
moo
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