On Thursday, October 16, 2003, at 02:06 PM, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
On Thursday, Oct 16, 2003, at 13:17 Europe/Rome, Jeremy Quinn wrote:
On Thursday, October 16, 2003, at 11:05 AM, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
<snip/>
It works beautifully when the .avi is a local file, but not when it is loaded over the net. I checked this in QT Player (entering the URL) and directly in Safari, and it also completely fails to play, even after having buffered it. No Audio, jerky video. I also tried saving the SMIL as a Composite, fast-start .mov (with external references), but still no go ....
crap, can you post the above (and the images) somewhere on the net so that I can see it?
<http://www.apache.org/~jeremy/>
Keep in mind ... this is a very rough demo :)
ie. I did not have Steven's slides, so I blew up snapshots from the video itself.
I made the slide region so much bigger than the movie region so you can actually read the text on the dense ones ....
I don't get audio,
Me neither
but apart from that it's not too bad.
I have lots of ideas for improving it, but it hardly seems worth it if we cannot get the video working ....
I ought to have a go at separating the audio and video tracks (where to store them?). So users can choose, which they want to receive.
Are you sure you don't have to specify the audio stream separately?
Yes, I am sure that you do not. The .avi file contains both the audio and video tracks.
(in fact, if you have different video streams, you need to tell which one is to be heard... or, how to mix them... Andrew knows a lot about SMIL, any suggestion there?)
If you load two movies with audio, they both play :)
People use this to make music mixing toys .... etc.
(OK, so this is not SMIL, but on the N�1SE home page <http://www.media.demon.co.uk/noise/> there are two QT sound tracks, each a single, very close tone with a slight bend on them. Play each individually and it sound like a single tone, play them together and they 'beat' as they interfere with each other).
I know of no way to disable specific tracks in a multitrack movie loaded into SMIL (apart from exotic Wired Sprites).
Steven, can you give Jeremy your presentation or take the snapshots yourself? that would help the overall quality feeling.
They are in place now.
It seems like pre-buffering is interrupted between the various slides.... I wonder if this is a quicktime problem or not. Maybe is there a way to tell quicktime not to stop buffering between slides.
There is a QuickTime extension to SMIL that asks the player to instantiate everything before it starts playing .... it makes no difference.
Unfortunately, I think the primary cause of this problem will be likely be to do with how the audio and video data is interleaved in the .avi file. (Not such a problem when the whole file is already on disk, in which case this SMIL plays fine). In QuickTime, they have the concept of a 'fast-start' movie, which I believe, means it is specially interleaved to allow efficient playback while the download in in progress.
Extremely painful as this may seem =:-0
We may need to experiment with different encoding techniques for these to play in QT.
[btw, can you windows folks check if the above works with quicktime for windows as well? thanks]
I also noted that if you remove the quicktime-namespaced extentions, it still works.
So maybe the DivX codec is not so good after all :)
divx is the most crossplatform/free codec, that's why I choose it, nothing about technical excellence in the choice. It had to be "good enough".
I'm not surprised if it doesn't work well with more interactive usage.... have you tried with real player?
Not yet ....
Did anyone try the RealSMIL version of the introduction yet? Did any Widows users with QuickTime try the QuickTimeSMIL?
<http://www.apache.org/~jeremy/gt2003/>
OK, so I could re-process the video so it would maybe work, but the whole idea was to re-use the existing files in different >>>> containers.
yep.
See what milage you get ..... I have hard-coded one of the UK Mirrors as the source of the movie .... if we can get this to work, we need a way of sending you off to your local mirror.
I'm full bandwidth with that mirror anyway, so it's pretty good.
Note that we might be able to do automatic redirection to the closest mirror, just like geoip-based URL redirection. shouldn't be much different from the mirror.cgi we already have
(and this is how we'll do block distribution with the librarian)
I'd love to know how ....
regards Jeremy
