Preserved Topic: Streaming media clips

I was wondering if anyone had any links that help me understand how to prepare and stream media over the net. For instance, how would I pepare a movie clip for the realplayer and stream it over the net. I know this is different than just allowing someone to be able to download from a link on the site...

Assistance is appreciated in advance

Phortay

Sorry I know nothing about RealMedia streaming, I popped open Premiere to see if it could clue me in but I went to compress one as a realmedia g2 and it prompted for the address of my real media streaming server. As much as I dislike the realmedai format, that's about all it took t make me give up. I do know a little about WindowsMedia and you can stream it from any server and the wm 7and 8, especially 8, codecs are fantastic. To do the Windows thing...

if you wanna play "movie.wmv" you'll need to make a file that points to it so it doesn't freak Netscape. Open Notepad and make like so:

<ASX VERSION="3.0">
<ENTRY>
<REF HREF="/path/to/movie.wmv" />
</ENTRY>
</ASX>

save as "whatever.wvx" (make sure you keep that space in there before the closing slash on the REF tag)

then link in your html to <a href="/path/to/whatever.wvx">link</a>

IE will normally play them without this but Netscape won't.

Hope that was helpful.

Jason

yeah windows media rocks for streaming!

get the encoder here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/WM8/encoding.asp

this is v8. you might try out v7 too if you want more compatibility.

I wouldn't mind seeing a tutorial on doing live audio streaming with Windows Media for the GurusNetwork. I've heard it's not that hard...

It's essentially the same technique for audio as the video above. I could possibly do a quick tip kinda thing on it but I don't think it'll merit an entire tutorial.

Could do something on the command line wm8 encoder that Grumble mentioned to flesh it out a bit, that's a bit of a bugger for some people but t's a fantastic codec, as for compatibility, Media Player will auto download and install it in 15 seconds or so so it's no biggie when I consider using it! It's like divX at the highest settings but it streams!

Jason

thank you for the info...really cool...heres my take...

I have to encode the video to be streamed as windows media...then create a link to a pointer file that will call the movie to begin... correct??

If so, do I have to use special code to embed the file in a html doc...or is that optional...if I don't will it just load/start the windows media player from the user's system and begin playing...

by the way...did I say thanx..

p.s....anyone have any links on the above (either for windows media player, realplayer, or quicktime player?

p.s.s. If I wanted to create a site that offers a series of video/audio clips in different categories...what would be the implications...would it be better to us ASP?