Streaming media

[Alex Rice]

On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 09:10  AM, Ken Norris wrote:
>
> My point is that if Rev can be integrated into displaying and working 
> with
> live multimedia content, then the broadcaster could manipulate and 
> display
> it while lecturing and going over the material in realtime from a 
> classroom
> studio, just like television but with the ability for interaction 
> (student
> questions, etc.)
>
> I see this as the _inevitable_ future of interactive television.

What are you envisioning as the payload that the player will receive? 
video streams? Or a lightweight scene description that's then rendered 
by the player?

I think a lot of Flash developers are already doing the latter, using 
the flash player to fetch live data in XML format, which is then parsed 
and rendered by a flash script. Different multimedia types are then 
fetched and inserted here and there.

Runrev could be used in mostly the same way (as in Richard's Beyond the 
Browser article)

If you mean broadcasting video, that's a heavyweight problem.

For that, Quicktime might be a good starting point, since Rev already 
supports the Quicktime player.  Quicktime actually has a lot of 
features like VR scenes, 3D, sprites and interactivity. However most 
developers don't know it because there is only a low level C API for 
doing these things! I know I wouldn't want to mess with that API.

Apple gives away for FREE, open source, the Quicktime Streaming Server, 
even for Linux and other server platforms. 
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qtss/ Broadcaster also looks 
like an interesting product - live encoding. It might not seem like 
Quicktime is used that much, but in fact ALL the major movie studios 
release their movie trailers in Quicktime. Recently I thought I saw 
cnn.com doing quicktime streams as well.

However, there are major licensing issues with all these semi-open 
standanrds formats like MPEG. (see http://www.xiph.org) I don't think a 
small company like Runrev could handle the licensing. It would have to 
piggyback on Apple or Macromedia or someone. Someone described 
Quicktime as only a wrapper for about a hundred different codecs for 
multimedia content.

OK now I'm just rambling.

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com