Question on Web Play of Slideshow

[Lin Evans]

For some time we have been searching for ways to play PicturesToExe files over the web and have variously tried Flash SWF, Flash FVL, etc., with the reasoning being having cross-platform compatibility. Recently it's come to my attention that most of the later MacIntosh OS systems will play AVI files which have been encoded with MicroSoft MPG 4 codecs.

This brought up the natural question of why not just play the AVI file directly? AVI has much better quality than Flash and the file sizes are usually much smaller. The later Windows Media Players will recognize a link to an AVI file on your website and automatically play the AVI in what seems to me to be sort of a "streaming" effect.

In light of this, I thought I would post a link to a test AVI created with PicturesToExe which was used with Riva Producer to create a Flash FLV file. But instead of a link to the Riva html which calls the Riva player, I just linked below to the AVI file itself. On all our systems (PC) Windows Media Player automatically recognizes that the web link is to a playable AVI and plays it. We don't have a MacIntosh to test it with, but would appreciate any of you with PC's and reasonably fast broadband giving it a try and reporting back on the video/audio quality experienced.

http://www.lin-evans.net/trevor/rivatest_vid.avi

Best regards,

Lin

[Ken Cox]

Lin

sound and picts are great -- perfect in every way

11+- mb file came down full bore on my dsl line at 130 kb/sec

ken

[LumenLux]

Lin, I really could not discern that I was not watching an .exe file. Info on my setup: broadband (cable), my own shows on Beechbrook (link) download from my own site at typically 350 kbs. In the case of your avi, I right clicked your forum link and then clicked "open in new window." The Windows Media Viewer opened immediately but took 40 seconds of "connecting". When the "connecting" completed, the show ran perfectly smooth. After closing WMV, I clicked your forum link again. This time the show ran immediately, with no connecting time. Does this mean the "streaming" show was actually all still on my machine? Further observation is that when I had right-clicked and "saved" from your link, the download completed instantaneously. The downloaded file played immediately when I clicked on it. Hope this helps. Now I have to figure out what I have learned from it. I do appreciate all the info you share! Thank you.

[Lin Evans]

Lin

sound and picts are great -- perfect in every way

11+- mb file came down full bore on my dsl line at 130 kb/sec

ken

Thanks for checking this Ken - I suspect that the AVI may be the best way to display a P2E slideshow over the web right now - at least when there are no Ken Burns Effects.

Best regards,

Lin

Lin, I really could not discern that I was not watching an .exe file. Info on my setup: broadband (cable), my own shows on Beechbrook (link) download from my own site at typically 350 kbs. In the case of your avi, I right clicked your forum link and then clicked "open in new window." The Windows Media Viewer opened immediately but took 40 seconds of "connecting". When the "connecting" completed, the show ran perfectly smooth. After closing WMV, I clicked your forum link again. This time the show ran immediately, with no connecting time. Does this mean the "streaming" show was actually all still on my machine? Further observation is that when I had right-clicked and "saved" from your link, the download completed instantaneously. The downloaded file played immediately when I clicked on it. Hope this helps. Now I have to figure out what I have learned from it. I do appreciate all the info you share! Thank you.

I suspect what's happening is that the show is being downloaded to a temp folder in Windows then played from there rather than streaming. That's one of the problems when you try to run your own shows - you are never certain from where they are actually being called. The fact that on second click it plays immediately is almost certainly an indication that it's being stored locally just as any jpgs or tiffs you open with an image editor. After a while they get "flushed" from the cache, but Windows is saving them in a temp folder and looks there before runing them from the source or downloading them again.

Thanks for testing this for me.

Best regards,

Lin

[ronwil]

Experienced the same excellent results as Lumenlux. Thanks

Ron [uK]

[Lin Evans]

Experienced the same excellent results as Lumenlux. Thanks

Ron [uK]

Thanks for checking this for me Ron. I've about decided that that for the present iteration of P2E about the best way to present them over the web is with a straight AVI show and perhaps a message to the viewer that they will need to wait a bit for the download to complete before the slideshow starts.

To get streaming one needs to use Flash, but to get the best Flash implementation the new Flash 8 player is needed and of course software to convert the AVI into Flash. The least expensive is still Riva Producer Lite which does a nice job but uses the older Flash implementation which doesn't have nearly the image quality of the original AVI. To get "decent" image quality takes a pretty large file size which is inconvenient even for those with good broadband. The newer products which produce Flash 8 are more expensive but Flash 8 produces excellent quality at very compressed file sizes. What takes 80 megabytes in Riva Producer (high bitrate - tough for even broadband) can be done with a 22 megabyte file in Flash 8 at equal quality, but then most people don't have Flash 8 installed so a "pop-up" file with Flash 8 detection must be used to port the visitor to the Macromedia site where they must then download and install Flash 8 before watching the movie. This "can" be daunting to inexperienced users so even though it's a very viable solution, it's still somewhat cumbersome and fairly expensive and requires a bit of technical skill on the part of the slideshow producer to accomplish.

So no "perfect" solution as of yet - hopefully by the time Version 5 is released (not the beta) there will be some good tools to facilitate this...

Best regards,

Lin

[ronwil]

Thanks Lin for that information.

Ron [uK]