[quote="Lowlander"]I downloaded the MP4 file and played in both Media Player Classic and MediaMonkey ... both looked of equal quality.[/quote]
Regarding the video quality, just have a look at this picture, left side is MM, right side is Windows Media Player. Which text looks a lot better?
https://www.disk.alice.de/FWmRRPl/public/mm4-video.png?a=UpVr8Jz3iLU

The video quality was just a side note. My main point is that [b]MM4 does not display the video in http-streams[/b].

I downloaded the MP4 file and played in both Media Player Classic and MediaMonkey and at the same size they both looked of equal quality. You might want to search the beta forum as this was brought up during the Beta process and some suggestions to fix this might be available.

Example: http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/podcast/1167200?view=podcast
When the episodes are downloaded, the videos are played ok, just the quality is really bad compared to other video players.
When MM has not yet downloaded an episode that you try to play, MM completely ignores the video and only plays the audio.