Introduction to audio/video over the internet, Rylands Internet Solutions

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An introduction to audio/video content across the internet

There are occasions when just filling web pages with words and pictures just isn't enough.

Sometimes it is easier to illustrate something with a movie clip, or you would prefer to present information by audio or video means.

Perhaps you wish to have a prestigious talk presented in the speaker's own voice.

If you are ready to take this plunge then these pages are for you. In order to make the right choice it is worth taking a little time to understand mechanisms of delivering audio, video and other content.

... as well as by other means...

It is almost inevitable that the quality of what can be reasonably streamed across the internet is not as high as you might like, or you may wish the audio/video to be made available on a CD.

If you are considering making your audio/video content available by means other than the internet then it is worth taking this into account right at the planning stage. This can save you both time and money.

There are some strategies that might be taken which are suitable for both across the internet and higher quality packaging for distribution by CD.

basics concepts

In order to make sense of what follows it is necessary to understand a few key concepts and how they effect you, the web site owner, and your site users:

portability
This is basically about what proportion of people can access your material. To illustrate:

You are looking at a web page. This web page can be viewed using any browser from the simplest text browsers (Lynx) to the latest versions of Netscape/Internet/Explorer/Opera etc. It can be viewed by browsers on any operating system: Windows NT/3.11/95/98/ME/2000, Linux, Unix, Macintosh, OS/2, Be, WebTV etc. It's portability factor is very high.

If I were to have made this as a Microsoft™ Word document and put it on this web site I would have immediately cut the accessibility of this down to two or three operating systems. If this hypothetical Word document had been made with Word2000 then I would have further disenfranchised all the users who still had Office97. The portability factor would be very low.

server bandwidth/download time
Download time is basically how long it takes after a user has clicked a link for a resource (web page, sound, video, file download etc) for the resource to become available to the user. This of course is affected by the bandwidth of the users connection.

Server bandwidth is what you the site owner is concerned about. Many web site hosts inflict penalties if the amount of information downloaded from a site exceeds a set level in a given period of time.

From both points of view it is worth keeping things as compact as possible. There is of course the added factor of filestore size. If you have some PowerPoint presentations containing 25 slides these will take up about 40 megabytes each - and that is without adding audio clips to the slides!. Your filestore allocation would soon be eaten up!!

security

It is your responsibility to ensure that anything downloaded from your site is safe. Given that Microsoft™ Word, Excel and Powerpoint files can propagate malicious macros that can cause damage to other people's computers is it worth taking the risk of making content available using these proprietary file types? This concern is heightened by recent revelations that even the warning that a document contains a macro and prompting the user as to whether they wish to run it has been compromised in the Office 2000 versions of Powerpoint and Excel.

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