Posted by Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] on 07/04/06 20:06

On Mon, 03 Jul 2006 10:21:42 -0700, P.C. Ford <meoh@mouse-potato.com>
wrote:

>I have done a instructional video for a piece of medical equipment. I
>have delivered it in DVD format; it has a menu which has links to
>various chapters.
>
>After delivering the master, the company wondered if the video could
>be put in streaming format. The reason for this is that many of their
>computers are older and do not have DVD players. No problem encoding
>the video. It will play from a cd on the machine, not from a server.


I'd probably put it on a share on the hard drive, rather than a CD
mounted as a shared drive. The reason ? Seek times.

Seeking on a CD is *very slow*, and the angular velocity is also very
low. With multiple simultaneous accesses the CD won't be able to skip
back and forward to give good random access between several clips
delivered to more than one person at once.

HDDs obviously have much faster head handling (and the tracks are
massively smaller), as well as better buffers and better OS/Firmware
support for queueing requests.


>However, I don't know how to create a useable menu in a streaming
>format. From a Google search I believe this is possible. I believe if
>I used Flash video, Flash could be used to create a menu.


I suppose it depends how good are you at Flash
(i.e. not FLV, but actually at creating Flash apps ?)


>As things are going right now. I think I will build a html page and
>then link to entire video. The video will be chopped up in "chapters"
>and then linked via html. Thus, there will be in effect two copies of
>the video, the entire video and the chapters of the video. Half an
>hour of 640x480 at 15 frames/second seems to take about 300 meg.


I'm not actually clear if each chapter is 300MB or the entire video is
300MB from your post. Could you clarify that ?


>I am vaguely aware that it is possible to do the chapters with some
>kind of WMV scripting. Also, Flash is a possibility for a menu.


Not that easily (or at least, not cross browser). One option, though
limited, is to host an ASX playlist referencing each of the chapters -
that will appear in the right hand panel of WMP9 & 10 with each track
selectable. Title and copyright information can be added to each
playlist item, or globally to the ASX file depending on preference.


In many ways, Quicktime is better for handling track based content
creation for what you have in mind - though it depends if the PCs
lying around there have QT on them (or can even install software at
all without admin access). You could add chapter tracks, with a poster
movie (a still image or short video loop) at the start of each
linking to the "real" chapter content

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/chaptertracks.html

If you prefer not to use Chapter tracks in QT, you could always use
SMIL instead to create a video container and a series of links to the
content - it would play standalone in the player rather than in a web
browser + playback control. (you could actually combine Flash inside
the QT player with the content, too ;-)

http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/quicktime/SMIL-quicktime.html
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/interactivity/smil.html


HTH
Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2006
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs

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