My wife and I just got back from a four-week vacation in Colorado where we used our new Sony CCD-TRV87E Video CamCorder to shoot up everything from mountains to family events. Returning home, I digitized over 6 hours of video onto the hard drive using my USB Fast ClipMaster. However, 6 GB were gone in a flash, filling the 20 GB hard drive we had bought in December! Trying to win more space on my development machine, I copied one of the 90-minute video files over our home network to my wife’s machine and was astounded to realize that it took 25 minutes to copy one video file over a 10 Mbit ethernet wire! Talk about new dimensions -- and I thought my 64K ISDN Internet connection was slow!
The question for web developers is: if it takes over 25 minutes to copy a quality video over a household wire, how can web developers possibly deliver quality, interactive, hypertexted video on today's web, where even in the United States most people are still experiencing the Internet through their dinky 56K modems?
The answer is to compress, stream and SMIL.
To see how easy it is to compress videos, get a $50 webcam, then download the free Real Producer and record a 60 second video of you speaking into the camera. You will be amazed that the resulting .rm file is probably well under 200K! Put this on your web site, make a hyperlink to it and your visitors can download it and play it with their RealPlayer, which most people either have preinstalled on their computers or can install relatively easily.
After you get streaming down, get into SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) and you will never think of videos in the old 1980s VCR way again. SMIL allows web developers to reference videos via script. So, for example, you can create a hyperlink from your web site which plays only certain sections out of a video, e.g. the sections 15 to 45 seconds, then 1:45 to 1:58, then 2:34 to 3:12 seconds. With SMIL, you can also createhypertextwithinthe video. For example, after downloading the free SMIL Tutorial, I spent yesterday creating a video in which I hold up a cassette and then a CD. While I am holding up the cassette, clicking on the video takes the viewer to an HTML page with more information on the cassette. Then while I hold up the CD, clicking on the video goes to an HTML page with information on the CD. Then I hold up both the cassette and the CD. Here, the video is hotspotted so that clicking on the cassette opens the cassette page and clicking on the CD opens the CD page in the browser. Simply amazing. Take a look at it yourself!
Compression,
streaming and SMIL allow web developers to get around the massive jump in demand which videos put on computers so that interactive videos will soon become a part of our everyday web experience. For web developers, this means that one of the next hot areas of web development is bound to be video scripting.
