Video Streaming Beginner Page

Second release (1/22/00) Steve Bergen,

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Overview

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This web page corresponds to the "techno-quickie" that was given to various faculty members at Nobles on Friday 1/21/00. We started with an introductory explanation of video-streaming, using the metaphor of a waiter or waitress serving food in a restaurant. Without video-streaming, a typical movie might be several megabytes and would take a long time to download from the server to your computer; this is analogous to a quality restaurant that takes 30-60 minutes before you get any food. In contrast, when your video is served to you via "streaming" it is analogous to being served portions of food as they are prepared -- salad, potatoes, side dish, fish -- without waiting for the entire meal to be prepared.

When you download a video-file that is not being streamed, you might have to wait a long time before you see anything on your screen. When you download a streaming video, you will usually see the beginning of the movie within 33 seconds, even though the rest of the movie is still being sent from afar. This method is far more efficient, allowing us in the year 2000 to define yet another use for computers.

But of course, this means that we need to have a fairly new Mac or PC with a lot of RAM. Even 64 megabytes of RAM is barely adequate for video-streaming! Upgrading older computers to take advantage of the newest versions of Real Player can be both problematic and more costly than buying new machines ... and so the computer revolution continues!

At Nobles, we recently purchased a Real Video Streamer for about $2,000 which allows us to post videos from a digital camera (or other sources) onto the web in less time than you can cook a good piece of fish on the George Foreman grill!

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First Base: Install Real Player (free)

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Make sure you have real player installed on your Mac or PC. You can download this from www.real.com. Click where it says DOWNLOAD REAL PLAYER at the top of the screen. Now glance down the page about 2-3 inches where it says "RealPlayer 7 Basic is our free player" and click. You will be asked for some info and can then click to download. There is a screen that describes "minimum and recommended system requirements" that leads to older version of the software if necessary.

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Second Base: Channel Surfing!

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Test these 4 samples. See if you can play, pause, continue each video or switch to a different video. The controls to play, stop or pause each video are below on the left side; the video will appear at the top. You do not need to stop one video before starting another one. Have fun surfing the four channels here!

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Movie 1: temp1.rm (Kate Boyle -- Nobles English teacher -- talking to her students about a textual analysis of Ode 1 in Antigone)
Movie 2: temp2.rm (Chris Dietrich -- Nobles English teacher -- talking to his students about the requirements for an upcoming paper)
Movie 3: temp3.rm (Dick Baker -- Nobles Head of School -- talking to the students from Kyoto Nishi High School the day after than their "more than juubun" video-conference)
Movie 4: bg1.rm (Bill Gilbert -- Nobles Spanish teacher -- talking about his upcoming trips to Panama with his students)
Movie 5: tomokograham.rm (Tomoko Graham -- Nobles Japanese teacher -- talking about our first big VC session with KNHS student

(naruhodo=I see, I understand, now I get it)

Rounding Second: Or try one of these powerpoint videos boosted with 8-10 minutes of audio!

• click here if on a modem... streams at 16 kilobits per second (file is 400K)
• click here if on a fast connection e.g. cable modem, DSL or intranet... streams at 100 kilobits per second (file is 1 meg)

"Powerpoint Movie boosted with Audio"
this 10.5 minute movie #10 will appear tiny, so it is preferable to

• click here if on a modem... streams at 16 kilobits per second (file is 500K)
• click here if on a fast connection e.g. cable modem, DSL or intranet... streams at 100 kilobits per second (file is 1.4 meg)

• New England Cable News ...www.necnews.com
• The wonderful French site that Mark Sheeran uses ...www.france2.fr/video
• Video views of the candidates and issues ... from the Boston Globe 1/20/00 ... www.freedomchannel.com ... easy to find speeches about each candidate on different issues
• Tufts University has some interesting guest lecturers on video ... www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/work_con_lec/lecarch99.html

Time for an info-mercial ... nope, it's not the George Foreman grill, it's the Sony Mavica 81 camera -- one of our favorite pieces of technology at Nobles ... but it is like the George Foreman grill in that it is juubun ("good enough" in Japanese) and easy to use ... and in the way that the George Foreman grill does not replace the oven and microwave and gas grill, but supplements them, I believe that the creation within schools of hundreds of video-streaming lessons will NOT replace traditional classrooms experiences but will supplement them ... Steve Bergen ()

Tips for the Sony Digital Mavica 81 Camera

(the one that takes one minute movies in addition to stills and saves onto floppy disks)

• Make sure you use a blank PC formatted disk and that it is blank before you start
• Make sure the person speaking is in reasonable light
• Find and turn on power button on camera
• Move control switch to movie (there are 3 positions: movie, still and play)
• Remove lens cap
• Hold down button while recording because if you press and release the record button, all you get is a 5 second movie; for most movies, you want to hold down the silver record button and keep it held down until the person speaking is done
• Give the speaker 5-10 second "hand-wave" warning once past 40 seconds so that your movie does not get too close to the 60 second maximum.
• Release button once done and watch the magic happen!
• Use one disk per movie and label the disks (you can alway re-use the disks later)
• When you insert the floppy into a computer disk drive, rename the file from MVC001.MPG to something more useful, e.g. LBIRD.MPG (by the way, MPG is the file type for these quicktime movies)
• Be careful of battery life. You might want to take an extra battery with you that has already been charged. There is an indicator on the camera of how much battey life you have left.
• You might want to have the camera "zoom in" to the person while she/he starts speaking so that the movie will not just be one relatively static view of a talking head; at least the viewers will see a zoom
• PPPPP (prior planning prevents poor performance)
• To play the movie, move the switch on the front from movie to play -- it will indicate how many movies are on that disk - for example 4/4 means you are looking at movie #4 out of 4 movies
• you will see MENU and INDEX and => .. the arrow => means PLAY .. you need to aim with the ringer pointer at the arrow and now you can push the ring in the middle to play
• above the words MENU and INDEX you will see two more arrows; these allow you go to the previous or the next movie
• changing the battery? Basically, you need to push the cover plate forward and then the battery slides up. The standard camera uses a special battery and does not come with an electric plug, so when you are out of electricity, there is nothing you can do until you re-charge the battery. A quadrant II strategy (important not urgent) is of course to purchase a few extra batteries before you have a quadrant I crisis (important and urgent) when you need to use your camera and it has the no electricity blues! If only they sold the camera with an electric plug, like the George Foreman grill; oh well -- I guess we have to say juubun ("good enough" in Japanese).