Streaming internet Media w QT and Rev Players-- Best Practice

[Sivakatirswami]

As it turns out all the  following suggestions, which I implemented

setting player filename to empty
set the currentTime of player player1 to zero
using "set the playrate of player player1 to 1"

All did nothing to improve performance on those Windows  machines of beta
testers who report failures. Actually it's worse than just a failure.
Rev completely crashes and they are forced to restart our application.
The gestalt app I've given them returns a configuration
  (XP, latest service pack, latest QT 7.X) that is virtually the same as the
configuration on Windows  machines where  I'm told it
"works  beautifully."

So, we have no recourse to a solution on this one,
short of one or all three vendors (Apple, MS, Revolution)
tackling and solving the problem... I think as developers we
are pretty much shut out here.  Pity, with streaming
media the future on the internet, holds so much promise
for Revolution. I see this as a major crack in our much beloved
Revolution's foundation for a strong future. But given the OS disparities,
I don't see how even Rev engineers can solve the problem short of
investing big time in a proprietary playing engine that runs in the rev 
core itself.

BTW, FWIW... streaming media from inside Acrobat with Adobe's "interactive"
media links is equally prone to failure, in fact more so, than the Rev
framework, so... just to keep perspective for newbies who may be lurking
this is not just a Revolution problem....in fact I pushed  hard on
a Revolution solution, just because Adobe's implementation was so very, 
very broken.
At least in a small test group of about 40, 25 of these said  the media 
was not
playing inside Acrobat even when they had the latest version of Acrobat and
plenty of bandwidth. I thought, "what's the point of deploying rich 
media if no one
can see it... let's see if we can use Revolution to solve that one..."

The only "ray" of  hope is that my  "gut" is telling me that it's not 
"merely" Quicktime
implementation on Windows, but another layer: something having to do 
with a network socket failure.
on some machines, where that whole framework for streaming is unstable 
while on
others it is solid. If that is the case, possibly there is a solution if 
Rev can find
a way to get a more robust pipe installed for the socket comms to players.

Meanwhile, I'll be looking into building a download-save-to-disk-and-play
option into application even if it means some users will need to 
download a 30 megabyte
movie before  they can watch it... that's better than crashing.
This also would be a major upgrade for users who would like to build a 
local
library of media they could view offline at a later date without having to
download again... something we considered initially but then threw out 
because
of the development time involved, and  the reluctance to load up users's
hard drives. But this appears now to be the only solid  approach.

I'm going to close  this  thread for now, as all signs are indicating this
is deadly quicksand... and to back off, maybe we'll see changes next year
or do a complete strategic shift away from Rev for media delivery and
go for a web base distribution model instead and just use revGoURL
and let the OS+browser+media-player+plugins do the rest...an "unelegant"
and fragmented solution, but it will probably work.

Sivakatirswami




J. Landman Gay wrote:
> Sivakatirswami wrote:
> 
>> and also I found this little golden nugget hidden in the documentation,
>>
>> set the currentTime of player "My Player" to zero
>>
>> in, of all places, the docs'  entry for "filename"
>> ============
>>   Important!  Setting a player's filename does not automatically 
>> update its currentTime property. If you play a movie file, then change 
>> the player's filename in order to play another, you must reset the 
>> currentTime to zero in order to start from the beginning of the second 
>> movie:
>>
>>   set the filename of player "My Player" to "SecondMovie.mov"
>>   set the currentTime of player "My Player" to zero
>> =========
>>
>> Jacqueline! Are you lurking? this needs to be copied to the QT player 
>> section somewhere
>> I mean, I guess its obvious, but gosh, I just had to bump into it like 
>> that....
> 
> I lurk here a lot. :) I've just entered a bugzilla entry about it:
> 
> <http://support.runrev.com/bugdatabase/show_bug.cgi?id=3863>
> 
> I recall now that several people have had problems loading movies for 
> some unknown reason, and have reported that setting a player's filename 
> to empty before loading in a new movie was the solution. Maybe the 
> reason that works is because setting the filename to empty also sets the 
> currentTime to empty. The nugget you found is a good one. I didn't know 
> it either.
> 

-- 
Om shanti
(In  Peace)

Sivakatirswami
www.himalayanacademy.com

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