I heard back from the engineers at Apple, and no, there’s no support for LDAP authentication within QuickTime Streaming Server (and they knew of no workaround). They did point out that NYU has had success implementing Shibboleth authentication using Darwin Streaming Server (the open source codebase of QTSS) but that’s not a lot of help today. There’s no Shibboleth infrastructure at Mason.
Our holy grail in all this is a single source video delivery operation, authenticating users across Virginia institutions based on their status at the “home” institution. Shibboleth would certainly solve the problematic second half of that requirement but implementing Shibboleth across higher education in Virginia (like glacial erosion) will take some time.
NYU’s experience is documented at this site:
http://dlib.nyu.edu/~ro15/shib
So if we’re to provide authenticated video streaming and take advantage of campus-based LDAP authentication, it’s looking more and more like Flash Streaming Server will somehow figure in our plans. I downloaded their free “developer” edition (Linux) but haven’t yet installed it. It limits you to 10 simultaneous streams and forbids production use but neither of those restrictions will interfere with testing the authentication piece.
A shoutout to the LazyWeb just in case there’s a QTSS/LDAP solution I’ve missed.