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Video Delivery Tutorial
Streaming RealVideo
RealVideo delivers video online as
a series of packets that are buffered, played, and then
discarded. One of the benefits of this is the "stream"
is continuous and constantly downloading. Another is
that the video is not being cached and saved to the
user's drive in any useful format. That means your video
can't be saved, downloaded, e-mailed, or otherwise used.
On the other hand, RealVideo is a proprietary video
codec and requires a specially configured server ($),
and a license ($) that increases in price based on use.
Press play to start. The control panel
on the bottom is fully customizable.
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The more typical presentation of realVideo
is just calling the .rm file in a link and this pops
up the Real player. You lose the continuity of a well-designed
page, and I'm not sure why it's more common. It's easier
to code, I suppose.
When we have the video parameter set
to "autostart=false" the RealVideo player
doesn't start downloading anything to display, unlike
the other media formats, which start downloading even
if they aren't going to be playing it.
Formatting Conclusion
If your server is set up to do RealVideo,
if you have access to a video compressor that can create
.ra files, and you feel your demographic has the plug-in
required to view it, RealVideo is a pretty good direction.
It offers good security for your content, and it's highly
customizable in both interface and stream quality. And
it's dual platform.
On the other hand the Windows Media
Format probably probably has the widest deployment.
Even those on Macs can download a Mac plug-in to play
Windows Media. The compression quality has gotten a
lot better.
Quicktime is also easily cross-platform
and offers some very good compression codecs. The quality
of Quicktime has always been good, and only in the past
few years have the others caught up.
I've skipped MPEG Video and .avi,
for no real reason. .avi has the highest compatibility
of any codec, and MPEG-4 should have the highest quality,
though not everyone has a plug-in that can play it.
next >>> Video
Optimization
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