I recently found out an article about streaming Real Media video on website. I have a deep look at it and finally noticed that it is publish early in 2000. It was indicated that Real media files is the most popular streaming format. It did in the past, but the situation is different nowadays. However, this article is still worthy of reading, as it not only mentioned about capturing video, but also video hosting for your own site. I think it is useful for us to get the idea about video streaming.
See how he gets the Real media file:
We capture DV (720×480, 24-bit color, wav audio) to the hard drive as an AVI file (Matrox RT2000) -> edit the footage as AVI files in (Adobe) Premiere -> output the final product to a single AVI file (more if the segments are longer than 9 minutes, which corresponds to the 2GB file limit in Windows). We then encode these finished AVI’s to MPEG-1 (VCD specs) using the Panasonic encoder, and then encode the resultant MPEG-1 file to Realvideo using RealProducer G2 Plus, using Cable/DSL bandwidth specs (220kbps).
The recent Adobe Premiere supports output with FLV, the most popular video formats for sharing video online now. It is popular because of not only the super compression of the original video with smaller output file size for less demand of bandwidth, but also the high video quality to watch online smoothly. I am not sure why did he encode AVI to MPEG for VCD. However, with more encoding the video quality will be lost somehow.
Want to know how to host video? Here is what he indicated.
Many ISPs provide customers with some amount of free web space. We have Cox @Home & they offer 10MB web-hosting space, with a monthly x-fer limit of 300MB. While this might be fine for the average user, or those interested in hosting a no-frills web site, fact is, ISP freebies provide neither the services nor space required to stream video. Nor will freebies offered by your local ISP allow you to use your own domain name, which is part of what’s so cool about streaming your own movies (streaming them from your own website).
The option to stream Real media is typically a premium service. In other words, most web-hosting providers don’t offer video-streaming as part of their entry-level packages. Rather, streaming typically comes with enhanced (read: more expensive) packages. One company that does offer Real streaming services as part of their entry-level package ($23-$30/month) is Communitech (Kansas City).
Movie files need lots of web space – at least, compared to the typical ‘text & graphics’ sites. For example, a single, 9-minute Real media movie file, encoded to Cable/DSL bandwidth specs of 220kbps, will claim ~15MB of web space. So it’s easy to see that the typical ISP freebie doesn’t offer enough web space for even a single, short movie, if you want decent quality.
Having your own space will be better for the control of your website. You may also use free video hosting service like YouTube, Dailymotion, or iFilm to get video into FLV format with their branded player.
Source: http://www.radified.com/Stream/stream_1.htm
Tags: Real media, stream, video, video streaming
