Streaming media

[Ken Norris]

**********
> Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 20:32:37 -0700
> Subject: Re: Streaming media
> From: Alex Rice <alrice at ARCplanning.com>
> 
> 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?
----------
Good response Alex...

If you're asking what I think you're asking, I'd say both. I just finished
watching Apple's live online webcast seminar on streaming with QT, which had
over 1800 participants worldwide including yours truly (albeit it I got on a
little late due to another meeting this morning). It went from about
11:00-12:15. The entire session was all about exactly what we've been
discussing in this thread (see more below). And, I should mention, my only
available connection was my dialup service through my 56K modem in my 350mHz
G4. The video was the usual slowmo framerate sort of thing we're used to at
that data rate, but it was still entirely watchable, even with the switches
to the window content, and I was able to take notes.

They will be hosting another _huge_ one from WWDC 2003 in San Fransisco,
June 23-27 at which they are expecting more than 10,000 participants
worldwide.
----------
> 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.
----------
Can you direct us to a website that is currently broadcasting live content
with Flash?
---------- 
> Runrev could be used in mostly the same way (as in Richard's Beyond the
> Browser article)
----------
Agreed. My ideas for using Rev, at present, would probably go something like
this:

1) If you have a special presentation as part of an educational program, you
could setup the class content in a downloadable stack, complete with
user-controlled clips, VR movies (for multiple angles), and realtime
manipulation of the subject content.

2) Along with the above, you would have a player running, perhaps in the
upper left corner of the screen, which is displaying both live streaming
lecture content and screen output for the students to follow along on their
home systems, during the webcast.

3) For additional data, say from an online reference library in a different
webpath, you could open another player that d/l's streamed data
head-buffered to disk so that it does an 'instant-on' display of the
reference material as it continues to play it.
----------
> If you mean broadcasting video, that's a heavyweight problem.
----------
Not nearly as much as it was. You can do 3/4 terrabyte (6 internal drive
array) live streaming with Apple's XServe package right out of the box. I
believe, in addition to the hardware and other necessary software, it
includes QT 6 cleaner, QT Streaming Server, and Broadcaster. That may sound
like an Apple ad, but that's a good deal more than anyone else is offering
at all, let alone at an affordable (for most companies) $2800 price. I'd
think that would put it well into Rev's corporate budget for a web tutorial
tool for its product.
----------
> 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.
---------- 
But, as I mentioned above, QT 6 Pro, at a lousy $29.95, offers more free
authoring ability than most people realize. When you add to that the stuff
you mention below, we already have a pretty fair toolset available.

All we really need is an expanded set of controls for QT, something like
HyperCard's QT Tools externals, i.e., I couldn't find any commands for the
display and manipulation of sprites in a movie.
----------
> 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.
----------
Yes, but those are just the _first_ of the two ways you can handle streaming
content. It's called 'Progressive Downloading', and what it does is cause QT
to D/L just enough buffered pre-recorded content (it knows the length of the
movie in advance) such that it can start the movie and play it to the end
without stopping, i. e, the buffering process stays ahead of the play
process, meets it at the end. If your QT Player settings are correct, this
makes for very smooth playback because it's actually coming completely from
a temporary disk file.

The second way to stream is with QuickTime Streaming, which allows realtime
streaming, i.e., everything you see is happening in realtime, like the QT
seminar I attended earlier today.

If you included the player skin in an interactive web page, you could ask
typed questions in realtime, or even send voicemail-type audio, if you had a
microphone hooked up, or just call it in to a temporary 800 phone number...
any number of possibilities.
----------
> 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.
----------
Simplistically speaking, that's what it is. But QT Pro now offers a great
deal of authoring ability that few know about or are taking advantage of. I
don't see that there would be any heavy licensing issues involved with
manipulating those through Rev.
----------
> OK now I'm just rambling.
----------
Ramble on....

Ken N.