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January 04, 2004

NASA TV needs a QuickTime stream

Kudos to NASA for their support of the web, and their presentation of a lot of realtime, and near-realtime, info about the Spirit Mars landing. But I do have one complaint.

I searched high and low last night during the landing and the wait for pics, and nowhere could I find a QuickTime stream of NASA TV.

Although NASA presents a lot of static video in QT, all the live streams seem to be in RealMedia. The only good thing I have to say about RM is that it's not Windows Media, which is even more unpleasant.

If NASA doesn't do it, then someone else should repackage NASA TV as a QT stream.

Posted by jghiii at January 4, 2004 12:12 PM
Comments
Posted by: Anonymous on January 15, 2004 03:52 AM

Agreed. I just happened on your page googling for such a stream. Hell, MPEG4 is at least an open standard, although it still has licensing fees like Real and WMV.

Posted by: Woody on January 24, 2004 11:25 PM

Hmm, I found this page the same way, and now I'm kinda bummed. Somebody's got to set up a big dish somewhere and slurp down the NASA TV feed for the rest of us. I can't imagine that the legal hurdles would be all that big, since anyone with a decent, if ancient, big satellite dish can get it for free.

How did Real convice NASA to use their horrible proprietary system anyway? (Same question goes for NPR, which not to long ago dumped QT for Real.) And couldn't Akamai host some QuickTime streams as a public service?

I think I'll go send some emails now...

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