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Streaming Media At MMD, weve spent a lot of time working with streaming media for various customers. Although the process of taking a segment of video or audio and converting it into a streaming media format is straight forward, serving the content is not. But lets begin with the process. Currently there are three generally accepted streaming format, Microsoft's ASF/WMV, Real Media's RM/RA and Apple's MOV. Of those, Real Media and Microsoft are dominant. Without getting into too much detail, converting a video into streaming format requires that you digitize or capture the image, then massage it for optimal display in as streaming file, which is the art of the process and then running it through a conversion program. I say this because many videos, unless professionally made, suffer from low contrast and color saturation, which results in really poor looking streaming media files. It also takes a goodly amount of computer horsepower to capture video without dropping frames and for anything other than short clips it takes huge storage devices. This is essentially the process above that of editing the video and outputting it as you would to videotape. The main issue behind serving streaming media is exactly that, the server. There are two ways a user can receive a streaming media file, they can either download the file in its entirety before viewing, or it can be streamed from a server using special software. In the latter case, the video stream sends a number of seconds' worth of video, based on the connection speed and then the video or audio plays. For short video and audio clips, you can get by with not using a server, but anything much past 30 seconds of content will drive off most dial up modem users. Cable and DSL users may easily tolerate downloading 5-megabyte files, but even that may only translate to 1-2 minutes of video. Lets assume you wish to place a demonstration or training video online. The video has been converted and now you need to serve it as a streaming file. No problems right? Wrong! Streaming media eats up huge amounts of bandwidth and there are relatively few ISP's that support streaming files and when they do, the cost can be substantial. There are several companies that specialize in serving streaming media, but most if not all are based on either real or expected bandwidth use. Serving video and audio can easily add up to megabuck fees. So what are the options? Well, against our normal best wisdom (see To Serve or Not to Serve) this may be a good choice for setting up a specific media server in house or co-located. Microsoft Advanced Server includes the Media Server pack at no additional charge. If you set the server up to specifically do nothing but serve streaming media, it should be a fairly low overhead proposition other than bandwidth issues. Real Media Server on the other hand is a separate license based on the number of concurrent users and the license can become quite expensive if you have a high traffic site. Either way, consider some of these issues before you set your heart on adding streaming content to your site. In many instances it makes perfect sense, but in others there may be less costly alternatives to delivering the same message with similar or better impact!
Multi-Media
Design
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