Glenn Fleishman
Tues, Oct 12, 1999
The Transformation of the Book Publishing Industry

Technical Tidbit
You need QuickTime 4 to view the video above because the file is formatted for streaming. When you loaded this page into your browser, you initiated a data stream from a streaming media server (in this case, a Macintosh OS X server located in Humanities Computing). The server sent a small portion of the movie as a buffer before beginning to play. This downloading and buffering continues throughout playback, and the video plays directly from the buffer to your computer display. Only the incoming video is stored on your desktop computer: once a segment plays it is discarded.

Streaming technology is the solution for media files of duration. This hour-long video occupies over 100 megabytes of disk space. Without streaming, you would need to download all 100 MB to your desktop in order to view the video, even if all you wanted to see was the last five minutes: hardly a feasible proposition. The drawback with using streaming is that, if your computer processor is not robust enough, or if there are network glitches, you may see some degradation in image and motion quality.

The video above was recorded using a digital video camera, transferred to computer using a FireWire connection and Final Cut Pro video editing software, and compressed for Web streaming using Media Cleaner Pro. For more about QuickTime contact Sarah Horton.