From the Office of Technical Management...

Video Format Analysis for Project Links

Purpose

Use video display to simply play a video in your module.

Investigation


MPEG

The MPEG ( Moving Picture Experts Group) Video display format has been largely accepted on the net. MPEG movies have arguably the best available compression ratios available, as well as excellent cross platform support. Decompression of MPEG files used to be dependant on separate pieces of hardware. However, with the speed of today's processors, software decompression is quickly becoming a standard.

Advantages

Disadvantages


AVI

AVI (Audio Video Interleave) Video format was a production of Microsoft's for Intel. Currently Microsoft holds the rights to the format. Specifically designed for optimization on the Intel processor chips, the AVI format is most typically a Windows/PC based solution.

Advantages

Disadvantages


QuickTime

QuickTime Video is a format from Apple. Originally only supported for the Macintosh family of computers, this format is quickly becoming a standard on the Web. Netscape ships with the QuickTime Plugin automatically installed for both the PC and Mac formats. (Unix fans can try the xanim plugin.)

Apple's recent agreements with Sun (Press Release) also implies native Unix support quite soon.

Advantages

Disadvantages


Recommendation

We recommend that you use QuickTime format for video. Software support for producing QuickTime files is easily available on the RPI Campus. Although MPEG compression is best, QuickTime is pretty good.

Another aspect of this decision comes from the Java arena. The Java Media Framework (JMF) provides somewhat uneven support for video, because is is usually built upon the native capability of the machine. There is also an all-Java cross-platform version of the JMF, but it is even more restrictive. All versions of the JMF do support the QuickTime format, but they do not support all of its codecs (compression schemes). The Cinepak codec seems to be usable everywhere, though, so please try to use that whenever possible. Also, if you make an AVI file instead of a QuickTime file, use the Cinepak codec there, too. See the JMF site for details on supported formats.

We do not foresee a huge demand for video in Project Links modules. Video files are typically quite large and take a relatively long time to download. This is particularly a problem if many students are accessing the same movie at the same time (e.g. in a classroom setting). If you do use video, try to keep the size down by trimming off unnecessary frames from the beginning and the end. You can also usually get away with reducing the image quality and still have the video be legible. With the development of in-house Java based video analysis tools we may see an increase in demand for video, but again the QuickTime format (Cinepak codec) is well suited for the task.


06/17/97