Lee Hogan While the future holds the promise of “total convergence” of media and shipping systems, we’re not there but, and it takes a bit (k, lots) of labor to get video of your band streaming from your website. Whether it’s a music video à la MTV or a minimally edited tape of an (optimistically outstanding) performance, your promotional plan is incomplete without it. You want to jump into the Internet river of streaming media, and right now.
Stepping into the circulation The first step is to “rip” the video onto a computer’s hard pressure. “Most of what we do,” says Bee, “is proprietary, without the use of any off-the-shelf software program, but for the common webmaster there are tons of ripping programs, some loose and a few not.” Windows programs Flask MPEG and MPEG Mediator are unfastened; unfastened applications for Macintosh include Mac the Ripper and Handbrake. Other ripping applications, for both operating structures in addition to Linux, range in fee and sophistication, fee from $10 to possibly $one hundred and offer a growing collection of alternatives as you move up the price ladder.
“Most webmasters,” keeps Bee, “will break the movie into clips, either as scenes or chapters like the original
or small 10- to 30-second clips” for promotional content material. This “clipping” paintings can be handled by way of single-reason applications — Bee says that a popular one for “slicing up video” is VirtualDub, freeware for Windows — however properly-heeled webmasters, like maximum encoding firms, will use one high-end bundle for each clipping and modifying duties.
Next comes modifying, meaning very last editing like putting watermarks, deleted scenes, and so on., on the producers’ route. “Again,” counsels Bee, “there may be plenty of software accessible. The most popular Windows program might be Adobe Premiere, virtually now not loose, observed via Sony Vegas .” Adobe Premiere is also available for Macintosh, however, takes a 2d seat to Apple’s Final Cut Pro. A Google seek will unearth many freeware (no-value) or shareware (low-fee) packages for every computing environment, some of that is quite powerful for the charge.
Squeezing those pixels If you are a do-it-yourself webmaster, that is a vital step: encoding. Uptime Video, of a route, remains on the cutting fringe of hardware, uses custom-made applications and strategies jobs in ways that are not likely to be duplicated by way of even the most gifted Web website owners working on my own. But everybody has to begin somewhere, or even using state-of-the-art off-the-shelf computer systems with freeware packages can yield the first rate, on occasion very good, results.
You should first decide what number of codecs to produce for streaming. For Uptime Video’s customers, says Bee, “We ensure we understand how and wherein they plan to use their content material.” For most site owners, keeps Bee, “.Wmv is the most famous format, followed by way of.Mpg. While.Mpg is an older, muddier codec, it’s far playable through almost all famous media gamers. Flash video is gaining principal momentum for that reason, due to the fact regardless of the computer, most browsers have the Flash player hooked up.”
Still, a diffusion of different formats and formats are getting used every day: RealVideo, QuickTime, diverse flavors of.Mpg, Avi and so on. Beginners can also discover it simpler to use “committed” encoders specializing in developing one format nicely — Windows Media Encoder for.Wmv, QuickTime Pro for QuickTime, Flash Video Encoder for Flash video — while greater skilled fingers (achieving into the deeper wallet) “can use software bundles like Sorensen Squeeze or VideoCharge,” says Bee. “With those, customers can encode to multiple formats thru one piece of software and one interface.”
Once you’ve got encoded your video — after trying diverse “bit charges” and compression schemes that have an effect on, respectively, smoothness of play and clarity of pix — it’s time to test with the agencies web hosting your web page. Hosting firms do no longer provide media servers and sufficient “bandwidth” (the quantity of data visitors allowed on a Web web page’s Internet offramp) with their bargain basement $9.95-a-month plans. Streaming media of any kind, track or video, entails a complex, power-hungry set of processes.
You also need to don’t forget the cease-users. One Hollywood recording studio spent loads of hours perfecting a Web web site with Flash movement portraits, audio/video clips and stay chat talents, all inside the unsuitable perception that “most of the people” have high-speed net connections. The website might also have succeeded in South Korea, in which approximately 75 percent of internet customers have broadband, however, the studio owners made their site almost inaccessible to the seven of each ten American Web surfers still the use of dial-up connections.
Tomorrow’s coming fast Major content distributors of a wide variety still provide low-bandwidth streams to serve all of the 56k modems out there. But if the future is now for those webmasters lagging in the back of the leaders, the destiny for MTV and other content material kings is drawing close like an onrushing teach.
Bee consents. “We are already seeing the main shift to Flash video because of the power and inherent blessings, and [the] average specifications for a domestic laptop are most effective going to boom further,” Bee states, “in order to make extra superior formats greater possible.” The video veteran also sees the principal and vast implementation of High-Definition (HD) video as properly, beginning with the h.264 codec now being used for the latest Apple video iPods…
“We’ll see greater implementations of the h.264 codec in different codecs like Windows,” Bee predicts, “which include new derivatives or even multi-threaded formats that surpass h.264.” Naturally, the proliferation of HD video, coupled with the release of the latest HD-DVD players, will gasoline the ongoing development of HD encoding, as well as fulfill the want for better compression satisfactory.
Average bandwidth capacity will maintain increasing as the Internet maintains maturing, says Bee, “so we ought to potentially see stay DVD-fine streams.” While a few websites are already trying this, Bee calls their efforts “dramatically unsuccessful due to the modern-day technology boundaries.” For now, this is.
Other makes use of Much of this new technology may be used in unique ways, and not just for innovative purposes. It also can be used to guard your investment in tools. You can without difficulty installation low-cost webcams and different cameras as surveillance and security to protect the places in which you preserve your steeply-priced system – studio, home, storage unit, anyplace. You can also set up a pc with a wireless card and send/acquire the ones identical images, to and from different computer systems, or even mobile phones.