Class 8-DRM ah-ha : I've been thinking about it since Thursday, and I honestly I can't really remember an instance where I've run into a DRM/incompatibility problem myself. At least with streaming media...Hmm, makes me wonder if I heard the blog assignment correctly or not. I donno. I've run into the Regional coding issue for DVD, when I've come back from Thailand a few times and it's coded on Region 3(?) I think. In terms of paying for streaming material, the only problem I've had is when I paid for a Charlie Rose interview on Google Video, and its encoded in a non-standard format, it looks like. Didn't play on my home computer. But still, for the most part, most everything I've experienced works as expected.

I know there are incompatabilities out there. It's a fine line: to allow your product to play on the competition's platform verses strictly on your own. Basically, if companies want to allow easier access to their product, they're going to have to give up some control. It gets more complicated the more 'digital and ethereal' audio & video get. They're no longer 'tangible' products anymore, really. But people are starting to expect fluidity between systems as a given this day in age. The BluRay HDDVD war is sure to have a winner. Uniformity in IT is becoming more and more of a necessity.

Class 7, Thu July 13 - Maybe pointing out the obvious is actually helpful from time to time. When Wootten noted a handicap of embedded players being that it prevents you from browsing to other pages, it occurred to me that this had never occurred to me. I donno. For whatever, reason I like the embedded player...probably for aesthetic reasons. It makes the page more fluid and if you WANT your audience to not stray from the video, it probably is the best way to go. But I thought it was helpful that Wootten outlined the advantages/disadvantages of embedded vs. separate.

Gosh, I think I would go insane being a coder. I'd probably have to be insane to be a coder, for that matter. -Probably appreciate RealNetworks' metafiling system the most, as it's a straightforward playlist of URLs. All the little details between media player library commands are nuts, and I can see how it would be somewhat tempting to stick with one media player format and get accustomed to it if you do a great deal of code-level work. I wonder if anyone else is noticing that the text in Wootten is starting to look like one long HTML string. But the embedding command distinctions are helpful, insofar as I always wondered how that is achieved.

I really enjoyed the chapter on mobile video. It's going to be really interesting to see how that takes off and how it changes the design of 3G units. Leaps and bounds are gonna have to be made, probably, to get it to be perceived as anything other than a "cool extra feature". Internet access has been available on phones for a few years now, but I don't know of anybody who actively uses the web browser on their Nokia. The functionality of BlackBerries are hugely popular, so I wonder if mobile video is going to pursue a similar approach in the professional world...maybe self-recorded video clips will replace text mssgs. Seems like you won't have to worry about maximizing compression with mobile players until ppl start using them as a primary entertainment/information device.

Class 6, July 11 Reading - "Windows Media Player"

Wootten seems like he's going through the motions of presenting the pluses and minuses of WMP in the unbiased manner he tries to. But it still seems like Quicktime is the standard that he's comparing everything to. The aspect of digital rights management being superior in WMP seems to benefit only a small portion of the industry, i.e. music/film artists and producers. There's really no incentive for the average consumer, and if WMP would prevent ventures like Youtube from offering streaming content, Microsoft is going to lose out on a big portion of the marketshare that is interested in non-copyrighted material. To be fair, he was an apologist for Microsoft's elimination of support for former RealNetworks file extensions.

Is VC-1 competing directly with H264 for market share? I guess I had the impression that H264 was an accepted industry standard, and that even MS was going to be exploring this codec. But if VC-1 is proprietary, then Microsoft doesn't have much of an incentive to go with H264.

In the end, Wootten is really saying if you have a Mac system and Mac affiliates, use Quicktime. If you have a PC system and PC affiliates, use WMP. Hmm, doesn't leave much room for Real.

Brightcove Ah-ha -- I took a look at Barrio 305, which is a Latino urban music site, showcasing Latin-American celebrities, musical artists, and models. It seems set up in the vein of MTV.com's "Overdrive", though the embedded media player and video thumb catalogue are part of the homepage and not extra features, which I think is a great idea. Makes it easy, and that's what people go there to see. I think the authoring of the page is a response to a much more i-savvy audience, and it presents the site as more of a video resource than an "information" resource, which is necessary if it's competing with TV. It also provides video codecs for distribution across myspace accounts, which seems like the new business card.

The next was the Indy Food Channel site, which showcases trendy hot spots, clubs, restaurants, and foods. Its set up very similar to Barrio, with an embedded media player serving as the mainstay of the homepage along with a thumbnail catalogue of other videos. Indy Food doesn't play content automatically, which to me, somewhat defeats the purpose of offering video so prominently on the homepage. But I like the simple use of Flash animation in the video inventory, and the video navigation is pretty straightforward. There's not much else to the site other than videos on-demand, which I suspect is the way that most major corporate websites are heading...

Wooten Class 5, July 6 -

Still having a hard time understanding for sure WHY Quicktime might be superior to other media players. It supports a variety of codecs, but so do its competition. Image quality and ease of use seem restricted to a Mac platform-I wonder if the only reason it's so popular is because Hollywood loves it so much. In terms of editing benefits, the avg consumer buys a Mac far less than a PC, so the benefits don't seem to crossover to the broadest market. Wooten seems to think its a big deal that you can rotate the image around and play it in non-rectangular skins, but I don't really understand how those features are practical. The ability to map video onto an alternate environment I suppose is becoming more of a benefit the more video serves as an extra feature rather than a primary draw to a webcast/broadcast.

I'm really interested to learn more about Quicktime VR. I'd never even heard of it until the reading. "Panarama" formats sound like maybe the direction video is going to be heading, as partially 3D flat screens are already developed. Quicktime seems to offer the most user friendly coding/editing formats for music and special FX. I didn't realize the codes for effects and music were supplied on individual codecs. The "busier" video and audio progress, I'd imagine that means more distinct codes within the stream. How will that complicate things? Will the codes degrade faster?