Streaming multimedia
 
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As streaming audio and video become more ubiquitous - America Online said last week it will include RealNetworks player in its next release - you might want to look at how to incorporate it into your Web site.
We'll leave aside for now the question of how to record audio or video - let's pretend your marketing department's sprung for a nice little recording studio and all you have to do is figure out how to get their WAV or MPG files online.
Fortunately, RealNetworks makes it pretty painless, with some decent conversion tools and server software. Vivo provides competiting streaming products.
To make the content more interesting, though, you might want to look at such issues as how to synchronize events with the streams, so that, for example, you could do an online tutorial in which one frame (or browser window) presents the stream, the other frame or window a series of slides that pop up at appropriate times.
It's possible to do this via current HTML through embed tags - RealPlayer, for example, supports a series of statements that let you define everything from client window size to the number of player controls the user sees (we once put a video stream inside a frame that looked like a 1950s-era TV).
But this can be clunky and, as we've found out, unpredictable - some browsers will show the content just fine, others will hang forever and do nothing. Relief is on the way in the form of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, an HTML-like syntax for describing and formattting the way streams are shown to a user. Approved earlier this year by the World Wide Web Consortium, it will make publishing of sophisticated streaming content as easy as, well, HTML.
Authoring Streaming Media Presentations for RealSystem G2: In addition to discussing the specifics of G2, this paper also provides some general streaming considerations, such as what to do if your audience is connecting at a variety of speeds.
Adam Gaffin is editor of Network World Fusion. You can reach him at agaffin@nww.com.
Multimedia with a SMIL:
An introduction to the spec. IntraNet, 6/29/98.
