Apple Computer Inc. Tuesday made its QuickTime 6 MPEG-4 player for both Mac and Windows available as a free download on its Web site. The company also took the wraps off a public preview of QuickTime Broadcaster, for capturing and encoding MPEG-4 content for live streaming on the Web.

Aside from adhering to the new MPEG-4 standard (DVD players and DVDs use the older MPEG-2 "gold standard"), QuickTime 6 offers an Instant-On feature which eliminates buffer delays and gives users the ability to scrub through streaming media content to find and instantly watch specific sections. Also, QuickTime 6 for Mac OS X supports the JPEG 2000 standard, which allows users to capture still images in a higher quality and smaller file size than the original JPEG standard.

"QuickTime 6 delivers the world's first complete media solution for creating, streaming and viewing MPEG-4 content," said Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple. "MPEG-4 is an open standard being adopted by wireless, computer and entertainment companies around the world because it delivers the highest quality digital video, and allows content creators to scale the quality/bandwidth tradeoff all the way from MPEG-2 quality to dramatically lower bandwidths for streaming over the Internet."

The player also supports Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), the standard MPEG-4 audio format.

QuickTime Broadcaster supports live encoding with real-time preview, and the ability to record and hint in real-time to the computer's hard disk for quick video-on-demand posting. It supports QuickTime codecs as well as MPEG-4 and AAC audio, AppleScript, the ability to create custom settings, communication via TCP between Broadcaster and Server, and auto-configuration of connections between Broadcaster and Server.