1) Real Video
People must have the Real Player plug-in, which is free and almost everyone already
has it. You must use their "Real Producer" which is also free (or Media Cleaner Pro
which is not) to convert a video to the Real Format. You must host the video on a
"Real Video" server, which is not free, although many hosting companies provide it as
part of the package. You need to be aware of the number of "streams" you are
supporting, which means the number of simultaneous viewers it can handle. Real is
arguably slightly ahead of Microsoft Media in terms of video quality, bandwidth usage,
and "intelligent streaming" which means changing the quality in real time to adjust to
the network conditions.
2) Microsoft Media
People must have the Microsoft Media player, which everyone using Windows does. You
must use their tools to convert a video to ASF format. You must host on a Microsoft
Media Services server, which comes bundled with Win2K. MSMedia also uses the concept
of "streams" but since the server comes with Win2K and you dont pay extra for more
streams it doesnt really matter.
These two are "streaming" video formats. That means that the viewer does not have to
wait for it to download to start watching. It will "stream" it to the player in real
time. It will also be (somewhat) intelligent about raising and lowering the quality of
the video to match the available bandwidth.
3) QuickTime
Not really a streaming video format. You start to download it, and it starts playing
when it has enough downloaded. Quality is up to you since you really aren't trying to
fit it into any particular amount of bandwidth (remember, its not real time, so more
quality means a longer wait to view it).
4) Other... like a CGI that pushes a multipart video file, or a Java app that displays
a video, or another video format like VDO.
All different...
My recommendation is find out what you can easily HOST first. Make your decision based
on that. Do you have Real Streams available? Do you have a MSMedia server available?
Remember that video uses ALOT of resources on the server and ALOT of bandwidth. 55
simultaneous viewers of a low-bandwidth video will fill a full T-1.
At 11:26 PM 10/2/00 -0700, David Shadovitz wrote:
>A friend of mine runs a company which provides tutorial services. He
>wants me to put videos of his lessons on-line, available for a fee.
>
>Any recommendations on the video format? Even better, what are the
>trade-offs between the various options?
>
>Thanks.
>-David
>________________________________________________________________
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