Here is an answer to my own question (see below) – Lion comes with Quicktime 10. Hidden in the utilities folder is Quicktime 7. Who knew? Quicktime 7 can be used to create a progressive download video. There are many explanations of the Fast Start in Quicktime 7, but it took me a long time to find the information that I still had a copy of 7 and it had been magically moved to the utilities folder.
How will I remember this next time I encounter this problem? Solution – move it from Google + to a blog I can search.
Here is a geek question. I have m4v videos embedded in web pages. Chrome and Firefox seem to download the entire file (takes maybe 30 seconds) before the quicktime plugin will even display the videos for play. This looks pretty dumb. Safari on the Mac or iPad displays them immediately.
The ability to play video as it downloads (not streaming) used to be called progressive download (Apple calls it fast start). Older versions of Quicktime Pro let you set this property, but the newest version while really cool does not.
I am not certain what is going on – are different capabilities built into the different browsers? It looks like I can download Quicktime 7, pay for the pro version (again), and use it on Lion. Before I do that, I would like to know that these videos that work correctly in Safari are not already set for progressive download and the problem with non-Apple browsers can be fixed without saving the videos out in a different format.