Player and bandwidth Detection -- and more!

Earlier this year, I wrote a tutorial about detecting which streaming media players or other plugins your users have installed, as well as the bandwidth of their internet connection.  Recently, QuickTime guru Francesco Schiavon, a New Media Instructor at the Vancouver Film School, shared this very cool Quicktime movie that detects player version, bandwidth, OS, language, and a ton of other interesting info that can be passed back to the web page using JavaScript.  

For fun, I put together a version that uses SMIL 2.0 <switch> properties to do something similar.  While SMIL detects and displays the clients player's settings, QT actually actively measures the available bandwidth.  Both are very cool - these parameters are available in the video player and can be used to select the best content to deliver to each of your users.