Trying to view his Steveness in the Apple WWDC 2006 Keynote addres? Me too, and haven’t been lucky for 3 days in a row. I actually managed to view 3 minutes of distorted, half-audio presentation, but then it died, and has given me an error 400 ever since. It’s not nice to see Apple not being able to cope with the demand. A bittorrent would be nice I guess.
In my first edit of this post I thought I’d found a mirror, but it was an old keynote. Searching on, I found a terrific tip which solved the problem of not being able to view the keynote. It actually turns out it’s the default Quicktime settings are causing the problems. Quicktime fetches the stream over UDP, which makes no guarantee over lost packets. You can set Quicktime to fetch the stream through http, which has a few advantages, such as losless transfer of data, and ability for proxy server to cache data.
To set Quicktime to fetch the video accros http:
- Go to System Preferences
- Open Quicktime preferences from the system preferences screen
- Click on the “advanced” tab
- Choose “Custom” for transport setup
- In the window that pops up, choose the HTTP transport protocol
- Close the system preferences
Now go to the WWDC 2006 Keynote address page and view the video. I just did, it worked fine, no dropped frames or audio.
Enjoy.
p.s. Tiger shipped for 80 euro’s when it was released. If Leopard is anywhere close to that same price, it will be hard to find an operating system which gives you all this, with this quality, for this price. Professional grade OS, for the price of a SuSe distribution! I love Tiger, I know I’m going to love Leopard. Since I have my Mac, my Windows laptop (which was an expensive one I might add) is sitting in a corner of my desk, covered under a layer of dust. It’s simply not good enough anymore. My Mac mini will beat it any day.