YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY
RAYEN COLLAGE OF ENGINEERING
&
TECHNOLOGY
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TOOLS FOR ENGINEERS
ENGR 6923
FINAL PROJECT
TASK 1
TASK 2
TASK 3
TASK 4
SUPERVISOR: DR. JAVED ALAM
DONE BY: GROUP 5
TAMER TAHER
ALI AL TAWIL
GEUN-SHIN BAE
Task 1
We install quick time player, and here what we go through the viewer
About the animation factory, we need to register through their website “paying money”,
so we view the free animations
We used the picture that we took during the class in our group and home pages. Here
what we got when we used the GIPM program.
For :Inkscape Software. This logo is going to be our logo for the final and we link it the
group page
For Ajaxsketch
For the album
http://ph.groups.yahoo.com/group/engr6923-06-G5/photos/browse/228c
Yahoo albums
Julbum:
And for sothink;
We had installed “Adobe SVG Viewer” but when we tried to view one of the .SVG
it gives us a error, however here what we reach...
files
For the video part we link all the works we did
through our home page and group page
1) windows media encoder 9 “capture”
“Individual page”
Tamer
Ali
Shin
2) Wink Capture”Home page
3) Crazytalk “Home page”
Final Project task no.2 (for Tamer)
Weblog http://commentssssss.blogspot.com/
Last time we’ve learned how to make our own webpages as a part of web publishing using the
webeditors such as Mozilla Composer through the course. Until now we just put the text or
some simple picture files on our webpages. The method to put the pictures in the pages was as
simple as we use other windows programs. But now we have to consider the skills to make the
multimedia files look better and handle with them. There are 3 big categories of multimedia.
They are Images and pictures, Sound files, and Video. Each of them sounds pretty familiar and
most of us know how to put these things in the webpages and probably some of us know how to
create and handle with them. From the rest of the class after Project 2 we’ve seen many tools
and kinds of them and even learned how to create and change some of them. In this project I am
going to review and add some more information about them and demonstrate some application
program.
1. Images and Pictures
Images and Pictures are taking important parts of a webpage. Most of webpages are showing logos,
pictures and some pictures. In order to make effect on them we have to consider what kinds of images we
can see and how to handle with them. There are actually two types of images. One is pixel based image
and the other one is vector based images. All images display on a computer screen as a grid of pixels of
various colors. The image files that contain these images store that image data in one of two
fundamentally different ways:

Bitmapped image files store image data as a map of individual pixels. GIF and JPEG are
bitmapped formats.

Vector-based image files store image data as a set of mathematical formulas that instruct the
computer how to draw the image. Macromedia Flash is a vector-based format.
Some file formats, such as PNG, contain both bitmapped and vector-based image data.
Pixel Based Images ( Bitmapped Images)
A bitmapped image file contains a rectangular map of the image's pixels (bits) where each pixel is located,
and what color it is.
By far, most of the images you see on the Web are bitmaps. GIF and JPEG, the most commonly used
graphics file formats on the Web, are both bitmapped formats.
Your browser (or any program that can display a bitmapped
image) reads the bitmap horizontally, row by row. Each
pixel is painted on the screen in the color specified in the
image file. In this example, each pixel is white or a shade
of green.
JPG
GIF is the right format for images that are composed primarily of lines and solid blocks of color. Its
compression scheme condenses repeated bits of the same color down to a single instruction that says, for
example, "82 orange bits."
A GIF image's color palette is limited to a maximum of 256 colors. Use the GIF format for indexed
images of 256 or fewer colors. The graphic must already be indexed with a color resolution of 8 bits or
less to save it as a GIF.
Avoid using the GIF format for images with complex, subtle gradations of color. For these images, use
JPEG instead.
Animation
Without requiring your viewers to have any special browser plugin, the GIF format enables you to create
and display animated images on your web page. This animated gif is made of a series of frames. The
ability to animate is part of the GIF89a standard.
JPG and PNG Format
JPEG Format
JPEG format is idea for photographs and other images with many different tones.
JPEG—pronounced jay-peg—stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. The JPEG format uses lossy
compression to manage file size. The JPEG file format is the right choice for photographs and other
images with continuous-tone color gradations. The JPEG format was developed to reduce the file size of
photographic images while maintaining quality. It doesn't do a good job on solid blocks of color; its
attempt to "smooth out" the colors often results in blotchiness.
JPEGs work with color resolutions of up to millions of colors (also called 24 bit color). When you save an
image as a JPEG, it gets compressed, making the file smaller. However, JPEG compression is lossy, so
each time you save a JPEG, you lose some data and reduce image quality.
When saving a JPEG, you can choose a compression level from low to high. Low compression give you
better quality but a larger file size. High compression gives you a smaller file -- but less quality. As
always in Web design, you must find a balance this time between quality and file size.
Here's a photograph saved as a JPEG file.
The JPEG format does a great job with
smooth color tones.
Here's a text image saved as a JPEG. The JPEG format does
a poor job with solid blocks of color.
PNG Format
PNG was created specifically for the web.
PNG pronounced ping or p-n-g stands for Portable Network Graphics. It is a lossless format, compressing
files without losing any quality.
The PNG format was developed a few years ago to replace the older and more limited GIF file format on
the Web. PNG is a very flexible format:

Files can be palette-based, grayscale, or true color images with color resolutions of up to 48 bits.

In addition, PNG has a number of new features: cross-platform color and gamma correction,
and fully variable transparency effects.
Unlike GIF, however, PNG does not support animation.
Although it's a new format, most image-editing programs can read and save PNG images. Macromedia
Fireworks, for example, uses PNG as its native file format. Since it uses lossless compression, PNG files
retain all information throughout development.
PNG offers several advantages to Web developers:

File size—Indexed PNG image files are almost always smaller (generally 5-25%) than identical
GIF files.

This GIF image uses a palette of 155
This PNG image uses an identical
colors. The file size is 5,125 bytes.
palette. Its file size is 4,253 bytes.
Transparency—Unlike GIF, which only lets you to choose a single color to be transparent, PNG
provides full alpha transparency. What this means is that you can have images with graduated
transparency. Imagine drop shadows and anti-aliasing against any color. In short, much cooler,
professional-looking images.

Gamma correction—PNG files can carry information to compensate for brightness variations
between Macintosh and PC monitors.
Despite these advantages, PNG is not yet fully supported by the major browsers. Versions 4+ of Netscape
and MSIE (with the exception of MSIE 4.5 for the Mac) will display PNG images, but there are
limitations. In particular, gamma correction and alpha transparency are not consistently implemented.
Compression
To reduce file size, file storage formats use mathematical formulas to analyze and condense the image
data they contain. This process is called compression.
Due to the bandwidth limitations of the Internet, files must be small in order to be viewed by the audience
in a reasonable amount of time. Graphic files are notorious for their large sizes -- to view them in their
original format would require far-too-much time over a standard Internet connection. In order to display
images in a brower in a reasonable amount of time, Web-based graphic file formats use aggressive
compression schemes to transform large images to small file sizes. Compression schemes are used to reencode data into more compact representations of the same information. In other words, fewer words (or
bits) are used to say the same thing.
There are two types of image compression: lossy and lossless. Lossy compression creates smaller files by
discarding some information from the original image. It removes details that are supposedly too small for
the human eye to differentiate. Lossless compression, on the other hand, never removes any information
from the original file.

JPEG uses lossy compression.

GIF and PNG files, on the other hand, use lossless compression.
Lossy Compression
Lossy compression creates smaller files by discarding some information from the original image.
Lossy compression removes image details that are (in theory, at least) too small for the human eye to
notice. PEG uses lossy compression. The JPEG compression scheme discards image data to reduce file
size.
Hold on just a minute! You're designing wonderful Web pages and you want the highest-quality images,
yes? Well, yes and no ... What you want is the best tradeoff between image quality and file size. For
photographs and complex colored artwork, JPEG compression provides a great way to achieve that
tradeoff.
JPEG compression is based on the fact that our eyes are sensitive to certain kinds of visual details but not
others. JPEG analyzes the image and throws out details that it deems unnecessary. How much it throws
out is your choice.
Since JPEG compression was designed for photographs with smooth continuous tones, it does an
excellent job with these types of images. It does a poor job, however, with images composed largely of
solid color blocks and lines; it tries to shade them and smooth them out, resulting in ugly artifacts.
When saving an image as a JPEG, most software allows you to select a quality level. The higher the
quality, the less compression and image degradation, but the higher the file size. As always, you must find
the right tradeoff between image quality and file size.
Quality
File
Image at 200%
Level
Size
Zoom
95%
10,153 bytes
75%
4,487 bytes
50%
3,172 bytes
25%
1,870 bytes
Image at 100%
Vector Based Images
Vector-based Images
A vector-based image file contains a mathematical description of the image.
Vector-based images are composed of key points and paths which define shapes, and coloring instructions,
such as line and fill colors. The computer follows these decriptions to display the
image. On the right, you can see the key points and paths that define the purple
blob. Vector-based images are edited by moving the key points or paths, as in the
animation on the left. As you can see, such images are easy to alter, making them
excellent tools for computer-graphic artists. There are two tremendous
advantages of vector-based images:

File size. Since vector-based image files need only store instructions for drawing an image, not
data for each image pixel, a vector-based graphic file is considerably smaller than that of a
corresponding bitmap file.

Reuse. Vector-based images can be easily resized, recolored, and reshaped without lowering
their quality (color, detail, sharpness, etc.). This is not true for bitmaps.
The vector-based image on the left
started out as the middle-sized leaf.
We enlarged one and shrunk the
other, but they all maintained their
crisp edges and purity of color.
Here we tried enlarging a small leaf bitmap. The
results are obvious: pixelization, rough edges,
and areas of blotchy color.
Before a vector-based image appears on a computer screen, it must be rasterized, that is, converted to a
bitmap. The display software a browser, image viewer, or graphics program performs this task behind the
scenes, calculating the color and location of each image pixel based on the mathematical formulas
embedded in the vector-based image file.
Vector-based graphics have been around for a long time. They are used in:

Illustration/drawing programs such as Macromedia Freehand and
Adobe Illustrator.

3D applications such as CAD/CAM, architectural rendering, and
animation.

TrueType fonts.

Charts and graphs in spreadsheet programs.
When it comes to the Web, the major disadvantage of vector-based images is that there are no standard
vector-based file formats! Contrast this with bitmaps, for which the GIF and JPEG standard formats exist.
This will undoubtedly change over the next few years. Various Web standards organizations are busy
right now hammering out vector-based file format standards, but there are many competing formats, and
it will take time before a true standard emerges. In the meantime, the only widely used vector-based
format is Macromedia Flash, which provides animation and interactivity as well as still images.
So for now, with the exception of Flash, use of vector-based images is limited to graphic design and
development, in programs such as Fireworks, Freehand, or Illustrator. Once the design is complete, the
image is typically exported as a bitmap: GIF, JPEG, or perhaps PNG.
.
SVG(Scalar Vector Graphics)
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a text-based graphics language that describes images with
vector shapes, text, and embedded raster graphics.
SVG files are compact and provide high-quality graphics on the Web, in print, and on resourcelimited handeld devices. In addition, SVG supports scripting and animation, so is ideal for
interactive, data-driven, personalized graphics.
SVG is a royalty-free vendor-neutral open standard developed under the W3C (World Wide
Web Consortium) Process.
Adobe has taken a leadership role in the development of the SVG specification and continues to
ensure that its authoring tools are SVG compatible.
One SVG example is as below. As you can see there is no loss of quality after zoom in the svg
file.
<Before Zoom in>
<After Zoom In>
Image Editing Programs
In order to handle with images which are mentioned above we have to learn how to create,
change and improve the images whatever they are. For each type of image(pixel based pictures
or vector based images) we’ve seen the two programs in the class. Gimp and Inkspace. We can
download these two programs.
Gimp(for pixel based pictures)
GIMP, sometimes referred to as "The Gimp," is a freely available open source application for
created and manipulating graphic images that runs on Linux and other UNIX-based operating
systems. GIMP is distributed under licensing terms defined by the GNU project. You are likely
to find GIMP as one of the optional applications that come in any large Linux package such as
those distributed by Debian and Red Hat . You can also download it directly. GIMP offers
photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring and is favorably compared by users
to Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator applications. GIMP was created by Peter Mattis and
Spencer Kimball. As a simple example I opened a JPG file using GIMP and you can see how it
look like. Most menus and functions are similar to Adobe’s Photoshop. It is not easy to get used
to it but there is help and tutorial files on the web so that users can learn how to control the
icons and menus by themselves.
Inkspace (for vector based image)
Inkspace is a tool to make us create SVG files. And it has similar functions like Illustrator. We
can use this one to make and examine our own vector images.
In order to create a vector based image we have to get used to using the menus first. I create a
simple logo for represent my group name using text and circle menus. The result is as follow.
I created a simple logo and saved it in a hard disk as SVG file. Using the webbrowser I opened
the file and zoomed in. As you can see from the right side of pictures there is no loss of quality
because it was created as vector based image.
Photo Album Programs (Jalbum)
Using Jalbum we can make digital photo album on the web. We can share photos and let
anybody see and enjoy them. Jalbum is free software so that we can download and install in our
computers and run it. If you use Jalbum you don’t need to create HTML files to adjust and make
effects on the photos. I created an example photo album as follow:
You can let the play one by one or just click the next icon and can see one at a time.
2. Sound files
In addition to images, you can also add links to sound files on your Web page. These files will
be large for sound clips of more than a few seconds duration, so you should use sound
judiciously - save it for those things where it can have a significant impact.
Well chosen audio can enhance a Web site, but sound files are large and should be used
carefully. However, streaming audio provides the possibility of real-time sound delivery, even
at modem speeds.
Like images, sound files also come in a variety of formats, not all of which can be used on every
platform. AIFF is a native audio format for the Macintosh; WAV is native for Windows. Both
platforms also can play and save sounds in AU, SND, and MPEG audio formats. Both also use
the MIDI format, but only for music.
AU (also often referred to as u-law, after its most widely used sound sampling scheme) is a Sun
Microsystems format that is popular in the Unix world and has the advantage of being available
on a wide variety of systems. So if you choose to link to AU files in your Web pages, people
visiting your pages from PCs, Macs, and Unix machines should all be able to hear the sounds.
On the other hand, AU files have comparatively rather poor sound quality.
If you are only concerned with other Windows users hearing your audio files, you can treat
them to much higher quality sound with the WAV format.
MIDI is a very efficient format for many kinds of music and certain kinds of sounds. However,
it is less well supported on the Web than the other formats and doesn't work well for things like
voice (unless you want to sound like a computer).
Most newer personal computers (and many newer workstations) come out of the box with
simple hardware and software for using a microphone to record your voice and other sounds.
The sound quality of files created in this manner will not rival recordings made in a sound
studio, but this equipment does provide a means for you to create files with personally
customized messages that you can include on your Web pages.
Creating a Sound File with Windows
You can record sound on your PC if it has a
microphone and you have the program Sound
Recorder. (In Windows, Sound Recorder is
located under Accessories menu of Start /
Programs. You may need to look under the
"Multimedia" or "Entertainment" submenu.)
Here is a brief intro to making a recording:
1. Open Sound Recorder. This will pop up a recording panel with a set of buttons. Above
the row of buttons is a window with a horizontal line through its middle. This window
acts as a "level meter" when a recording is being made or played.
2. Choose "New" under the "File" menu.
3. Click the
button to start recording.
4. Speak into the microphone. You should see oscillations in the level meter to indicate
your sound is being recorded
5. Click the
button when you are finished.
6. Click "Save As" under the "File" menu and choose a folder and file in which to store
your sound.
The resulting file is in WAV format.
If you want to make another recording and save it a different file, be sure to choose "New"
under the File menu again before you begin the next recording. If you forget to choose "New",
the next recording will be placed in the same file as the previous one (the second recording will
begin right after the end of the first one).
Linking to Your Sound File
The sound file that you have just produced can be played from a browser link. For example, use
<a href="file.wav">Sound File</a>
if file.wav was the name of the file in which you saved the recording. If a browser is configured
to play audio files of this type, the sound should begin when this link is clicked.
Streaming Sound & Audio Players
A more efficient way to transmit sound on the Web is to stream it, which means that the sound
plays as it is being loaded, rather than waiting for the full file to download. In the next section
we discuss one way of playing streaming sound. Also, the program Flash discussed later has the
capability to create streaming sound files.
As noted earlier, sound files of even short time duration and fairly middling quality can be quite
large and take a while to download at most common connection speeds. As the duration
increases and/or the quality improves, the file size grows quickly. Of course, the file size and
long download time problems are even greater with video. Consequently, the ability to stream
audio and video can often be vital to making the use of these media on the web practical.
One popular means of accessing streaming media on the web is with RealPlayer, freeware
available for PowerMacs, Windows, and Unix systems from RealNetworks. (You can also
obtain a commercial version of the program that has additional features from the same site.)
RealPlayer plays both streaming audio and video, and it can function either as an independent
application to access real time audio on the net (for example, many radio stations), or as a plugin application that is launched automatically by the Web browser when you connect to a site
transmitting a real time audio stream. (A properly configured browser will know to use
RealPlayer because the streaming file will be in a special format, not one of the ones we
discussed previously.)
Some Caveats
The transmission of high quality real time audio on the network generally requires at least 28.8
kbaud modem connectivity. You can still connect at slower speeds, but the sound quality will be
diminished. Over ISDN and faster connections the sound quality can be quite high from sites
offering a 28.8 kbaud stereo audio stream if you have stereo speakers on your computer.
RealPlayer's Realguide
A starting point for exploring audio/video sites on the Internet is the realguide. From this site,
you can find a variety of News, Industry, Business, and on-line radio broadcasts of all types, as
well as special events. The site can be accessed from the link just given, and it can also be
accessed directly from RealPlayer itself, as shown in the figure below.
Assuming that RealPlayer has been installed and configured to launch automatically from your
browser, you can explore a variety of sites simply by clicking and following the instructions.
Check out this gallery to search for audio and video of special events from NASA's space
missions.
Sounds that you find in an archive may not be in a format suitable for playing on your own
system. This is less of a problem than it once was, since the trend in newer browsers is to
include plugins capable of playing most common formats. Nevertheless, it still may be
necessary to convert sound formats. For example, java applets are capable of playing only files
in AU format. Two Macintosh programs that we have used for sound format conversion are
Sound App and ConvertMachine. For PC systems, the Goldwave sound edting system allows
users to convert different types of audio formats.
It is very easy to add links to your web pages that let your readers play sounds. Yep, the solution
is the obvious one that you've probably already figured out. If you wish, you can links to sound
files on your web page.
<h2> Sound Files </h2>
<a href="soundfile name"> </a>
You can also add sound to your web pages by using more advanced techniques such as java,
javascript, and Flash. For example, with javascript it is possible to play sounds of your choosing
when someone enters or leaves your page, or when a person mouses over certain parts of the
page. Granted, these techniques are more complicated than simply providing a link to a sound,
but they provide the possibility of more elaborate audio effects.
TTS (Text To Speech)
Text-to-speech technology allows an alternate spoken method for conveying textual information.
As the name implies, text-to-speech converts ASCII text into the spoken word. Instead of a
digitized recording, however, a synthesized voice is used in order to speak-out words and
phrases on-the-fly. Applications for this technology include order entry systems (providing
verbal confirmation on hundreds of products), customer name and address systems (access to
thousands of addresses and names for locator capabilities), and telephone access to e-mail
messages. In addition, TTS can be used to gain access to news information for stock quotes so
brokerage firms can give callers access to corporate news headlines along with stock quotes.
Newspaper access for the blind is another use for TTS technology.
There are two different program that we can examine before buying TTS program. One is Crazy
Talk 4 and the other is Neospeech. We can try to use them visiting the website.
http://www.techknowledgey.co.uk/cm/wrapper/Crazy_Talk_4/
is
for
crazy
talk
and
http://www.neospeech.com is for neospeech.
3. Computer Animation and Video
It is possible to send and play movie files across the Web. Obviously, movies can have a large
visual impact with significant capability for education. However, you should remember that
movie files are generally very large. To display movie files efficiently you need fast network
connections such as those offered by cable modems and related high-bandwidth technologies. It
is very important for you to address the bandwidth issue before investing in movie technology.
Video cameras, digital video cameras, and video-editing software are still quite expensive. It
costs considerably more to produce decent quality video than to produce sound and images.
Even if you can afford to create video for the web, you still need to make sure that your network
can transmit large files at a high enough rate and that your intended audience has sufficiently
fast Internet connections to be able to download your movies in a reasonable amount of time.
Otherwise, few people are likely to have the patience to wait while your video makes it way
over the web to their computers. In which case, all your investment in equipment, time, and
work may have been for nought.
QuickTime and MPEG are two of the most common cross platform movie formats currently in
use. Of these, QuickTime is perhaps more popular because of its compatability and ability to
synchronize multiple media streams. Players for QuickTime multimedia are freely available for
the Macintosh, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP from
http://quicktime.apple.com/.
Actually, QuickTime is not really a movie format, but is a software development package that
allows the synchronization of video, text, sound, and music. But the name "QuickTime" has
come to be popularly applied to movies files that are produced using this package. Such files
generally have either a .MOV or .QT extension. (Note that while the Quicktime players are free,
the developer's package is a commercial product from Apple.)
Many movies that originate on Windows systems are produced in the AVI format (and have
an .AVI extension). Windows users can view these movies with Windows Media Player that is
included with their systems.
As was the case with sound, browsers themselves do not play movies that they receive from a
server. Instead, they can be configured either to save a movie to a disk file, to pass the movie to
a "helper" program that can play the movie, or to use a special plug-in to play the particular
format. For the Macintosh, a freeware program Sparkle can be used to play both MPEG and
QuickTime movies, and can also be used to convert between the two formats.
Creating Movies
If you have access to an analogue video camera, a digital video camera, or a digital still camera
(some models can shoot 15-30 seconds of video), you can use it to create your own movie files.
In the case of the analogue video camera, you will need a way to convert the video footage into
a digital format that your computer can handle.
The documentation for the software used with a digital video camera should provide the details
of how to create movies. The original movie clips will probably be stored in a proprietary
format, in which case it will be necessary to have software that converts the format to the
common ones used on the web (AVI, MPEG, and Quicktime).
Apart from the software bundled with digital cameras, there are other programs that let you
manipulate video files. For example, they may allow you to edit a movie file (regardless of how
it was originally created). One very popular such program is Apple's Quicktime Pro. This is a
relatively inexpensive program that allows you to view movies, edit them, and import and
export the results in various different file formats (and it has additional features). Examples of
still more full-featured (and more expensive) commercial-grade video editing programs are
Apple's Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier.
There are also various programs that will allow you to construct movies from individual images,
somewhat like a conventional movie reel is created by putting together frames of still pictures
(and somewhat like the process of creating animated GIF images). As an example of a movie
constructed from still frames, here is a truly spectacular movie (warning: this MPEG file is 780
KByte so it may take a while for you to download) created by NASA using still images taken
with the Hubble Space Telescope. This movie is as close to the viewscreen from the bridge of
the starship Enterprise as we are likely to get in real life! (Here is an explanation of what you
are seeing in this movie, in case you are interested.)
Finally, we note that not only can the Windows screen capture program SnagIt save snapshots
of static screen areas (as we've seen), it can also capture a changing portion of the screen to an
AVI movie. You could, in fact, use SnagIt to capture an animated gif to an AVI movie. (But
you should, by now, realize that, for various reasons, this would probably not be a good idea.)
Can you think of some cases where SnagIt's video capture mode could help you?
Movie Resources
Here are some links to archives of movie files and related material. In these archives you will
find a variety of movies in MPEG, AVI, and QuickTime format. One thing that you will
immediately find with movie files: they are very large. Even relatively short movies may be
multiple megabytes in length, so there are practical limitations to using movies on the Web if
your network connections are slow.
Adding Movies to Web Pages
It is just as easy to put links to movies on your web pages as it was to add links to sounds and
external image files.
A Simple Example
For example, get the files named example1.mpg and example2.mpg:
1. For each of these files, hold the right mouse button down over the link.
2. Select "Save Target As . . .", in the resulting dialog box.
3. Specify to save with the default names (example1.mpg and example2.mpg).
4. Select your homepage directory for the destination, and then click "Save". (These files
are 308 kB and 105 kB long, respectively, so this may take a while if your link is slow.)
Then we can link to the movies by adding the following to your homepage file:
<hr>
<h2> Some Movie Files </h2>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="example1.mpg">
example1</a>
<li>
<a href=" example2.mpg">example2</a>
</ul>
<hr>
Save this, point the browser to your homepage file, and reload. You should see something like
the following:
Some Movie Files

example1

example2
In this HTML, <ul> starts an un-numbered list, </ul> ends the un-numbered list, and <li>
precedes each separate member of the list. In this example we have put only two elements in the
list, but we could add any number by using more <li> lines.
Remember though, that even a movie of 30 seconds duration will take many minutes to
download over a typical modem connection. Thus, if you are developing Web pages intended to
be used with modem-level connections, you should use movies judiciously. (As noted
previously, these large file sizes are a primary motivation for streaming video, and audio, where
possible.) It is also courteous to indicate the length of large files like movies, so that viewers
know that they are about to initiate a download that may take some time.
Final Project task no.2 (for Geun-Shin Bae)
http://koreaforever.blogspot.com/
After the project 2, we've started learning the rest of tools for online publishing. The HTML
editors such as Moxilla Composer, MS Word had been examined and now we can apply the
tools that we've learned in the class to create our webpages and make them look more
professional pages.
The HTML documents can contain the three other materials in the webpages.
Images and Pictures
Sound files
Computer Animation and Video.
Using HTML editors we can put those materials in a webpage to make it look more
professionally. From now on, I’m going to review those three categories in detail.
1. Images and Pictures.
1.1 Type of Images and Pictures.
We can put images and pictures into out webpage using IMG tag or using the “insert image”
menu in any HTML editors. There are actually two types of Images. These are as follows:
Pixel based images (Bitmaps).
Vector based Images.
Bitmaps refer to pixel based formats such as Photoshop, TIFF and JPEG. These images are
made up of tiny pixels of information, each having its own value of density and color. More
pixels in a given area will result in better image quality and “higher resolution.” More pixels
also result in a larger file size. Bitmap images are best suited for photographs and artwork
containing a lot of detail and subtle shading. Since bitmap images are made up of an exact
amount of information, enlargement will result in a loss of quality.
Vectors refer to shapes, and are used by drawing programs such as Adobe Illustrator and
PowerPoint. A vector is the mathematical formula used to create a specific graphic. It contains
information such as shape, fill color, stroke etc. Vectors are best suited to text, graphs and
illustrations that contain limited detail and shading. There are no pixels. Vectors are not
resolution specific, and can be scaled up or down without loss of quality. The computer simply
takes the information and draws the shape, fills the color, etc. The TIFF format is robust and has
a minimal amount of issues. One drawback of using tiff is the large file it creates.
1.1.1 Pixel based images
We can see PNG, TIF, JPG and GIF files from a lot of websites. These files are most popular
pixel based images. In accordance with the purposes these files are can be selected. The
comparisons are as follows:
Photographic Images
Graphics, including
Logos or Line art
Properties
Continuous tones, 24 bit color or
Solid colors, up to 256 colors, with text
8 bit Gray, no text, few lines and
or lines and sharp edges
edges
Best Quality for
TIF or PNG
PNG or GIF or TIF
Archived Master
(no JPG artifacts)
(no JPG artifacts)
Smallest
JPG with a higher Quality factor
TIF
can
PNG
File
Size
be
decent
(JPG
is
LZW
or
GIF
or
(graphics/logos usually permit
questionable quality for archiving
reducing to 2 to 16 colors for smallest
master copies)
file size)
Maximum
TIF or JPG
TIF without LZW
Compatibility
(the simplest programs may not
or GIF
(PC, Mac, Unix)
read TIF LZW)
Worst Choice
256 color GIF is very limited
JPG compression adds artifacts, smears
color, and is a larger file than 24
text and lines and edges
bit JPG
TIF file format is the undisputed leader when best quality is required. TIF is very commonly
used in commercial printing or professional environments. Web pages require JPG or GIF or
PNG image types, because that is all that browsers can show. On the web, JPG is the best choice
(smallest file) for photo images, and GIF is most common for graphic images. JPG cannot be
beat for emailing photographs to friends, and for web page use. The JPG file format is the
smallest by far, and a JPG copy should be used for such purposes (when file size is all
important). For Line art and graphic files (as opposed to photographic images), then GIF files
have historically been best, both for smallest size and for best quality.
1.1.2 Vector based images
Vector-based images generally contain well-defined elements such as curves and shapes of
various colors. These elements can either be pure graphics, western alphabets or Asian
characters. Each element is defined mathematically by the computer. For example, if a vectorbased image contains a red dot, then information such as the location of the circle's center point,
the length of its radius, and the color, red, would be the essential information for this image file.
File names for vector-based images usually consist of extensions such as *.EPS, *.AI, *CDR, or
*.DWG. Vector-based files are more suitable for illustrations that require precise measurements.
They are also easily scalable due to their mathematical nature. However, the vector-based file
format has its drawbacks as well. It is not good for displaying photo-realistic images such as a
photograph because images of this type generally do not contain well-defined shapes and curves.
1.1.3 SVG(Scalar Vector Graphics) plugin
SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, and that it is an XML language for sophisticated 2dimensional graphics. SVG is to graphics what XHTML is to text, MathML is to mathematical
equations and CML is to the description of chemical molecules. SVG is similar in scope to
Macromedia's proprietary Flash technology: among other things it offers anti-aliased rendering,
pattern and gradient fills, sophisticated filter-effects, clipping to arbitrary paths, text and
animations. What distinguishes SVG from Flash, is that it is a W3C recommendation (i.e. a
standard for all intents and purposes) and that it is XML-based as opposed to a closed binary
format. It is explicitly designed to work with other W3C standards such as CSS, DOM and
SMIL. There are various tools to view SVG under Windows, including a special build of
Mozilla, plugin from Corel, the Squiggle tool from the Apache Batik project, and finally the
Adobe SVG Viewer plugin. At the time of writing, only the Adobe plugin is complete enough
in order to use all the functionalities of the Navimages viewer. It is available as a 3.0.1 final
release and as a 6 preview 1 release. Both versions work, but version 3.0.1 is more stable
although the 6 preview 1 version has a few more features, including cursor support. Most of
computers with a Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin installed already have the Adobe SVG Viewer
also installed, but an update may be necessary. To install or update the Adobe SVG Viewer, you
only have to download the installer (version 3.0.1 or 6 preview 1) and execute it. You may note
that if you install more than one SVG plugin, the SVG Switcher tool may be useful for
activating or deactivating the various versions.
When you make this installation, only the Internet Explorer will know about the plugin. If you
wish to use it with a recent version of Mozilla or Firefox, you must copy the two files
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG Viewer 6.0\Plugins\NPSVG6.dll et C:\Program
Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG Viewer 6.0\Plugins\NPSVG6.zip in the plugins folder of your
Mozilla/Firefox installation folder, and then restart it.
Examples1 :
The left picture is an example
from
the
site
of
http://sdx.archivesdefrance.culture
.gouv.fr/gpl/navimages/examples/
viewer/static/DROITSHOMME/navimages-en.svg. you
can see the plug-in icons and the
contents with MSIE6.0. If you
adjust the size of the picture you
can make the picture look like as
follow
Example 2:
This example is showing the magintude from
the original size of the picture to the
minimum and maximum size of it.
1.2 Panoramas (Quicktime VR)
A QTVR panorama lets you stand in a virtual place and look around. It provides a full 360
degree panorama and in QuickTime, the ability to tilt up and down a full 180 degrees.The actual
horizontal and vertical range, however, is determined by the panorama itself. To look left, right,
up and down, you drag with the mouse across the panorama.
QuickTime 5 introduced a QuickTime VR cubic playback engine, which allows you to work
with enhanced VR panoramas that include a ceiling view and a floor view as well. This new
type of QuickTime VR panorama is the cubic panorama. It is represented by six faces of a
cube, thus enabling the viewer to see all the way up and all the way down. From the site
http://www.panoramas.dk we can see the panorama as follow:
1.3
Image Editors.
There are many of image editors that we can use for editing the digital images for webpages.
The most popular editors are Adobe Photoshop, PC Paint Brush. And we can obtain other
programs for free to brief jobs. In this paper I’m going to review the opensource software Gimp
for demonstration of resize and improve.
1.3.1 Gimp
The left picture is Gimp’s first figure that you can see
when you run the program. There are a lot of icons that
allow you to make effects on your own pictures. You can
just pick one of them and use on your picture and then you
can get whatever you want.
If you want to resize a picture then click the “Image” and
“Scale Image” then you can see as follow.
If you choose the size from 2048x1536 to 640x480 you will get the image like below
1.3.2 Inkspace (for vector based image)
Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator,
Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file
format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending,
transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons metadata, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text,
and direct XML editing. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, and TIFF and exports PNG as
well as multiple vector-based formats.
Using Inkspace we can make vector graphics such as logos. An example is shown as follow:
After you finish downloading the program from http://www.inkscape.org you can run it to
install in you PC. When you run the program you can see the initial window with icons that look
familiar with us.
In order to create a vector based image we
have to get used to using the menus first. I
create a simple logo for represent my
group name using text and circle menus.
The result is as follow.
1.4
Photo Album Programs
Photo Album Programs enable us to create the digital photo albums on our webpages. Most
programs are easy to use and we can get them freely.
I downloaded Jalbum from http:/jalbum.net and created my own photo album. The picture
below is an outcome from Jalbum and we can see using a webbrowser.
2. Sound files
2.1.1 Digital vs. analog
The second thing that I’m going to review is about sound files. Incorporating sound in a
presentation or WWW page involves preparing the original sound and digitizing it in an
appropriate format. Because we tend to be visually oriented, sound production can be harder to
do well than visual production, so you'll probably need to spend more time on it that you might
think. Sound fills the air all around us, and our ear is working all the time to filter out
unimportant sound from our consciousness so we can pay attention to the important information.
This means that we are largely unaware of how much sound surround us at all times. If you
concentrate on what you hear, you will find that silence is very hard to find. A microphone
does not have an intelligent filter, so it will pick up everything (depending on how sensitive it
is). By carefully preparing your recording environment, you can eliminate a lot of the
background noise that might otherwise spoil your soundtrack. Getting a clean recording at the
outset will mean less work trying to fix problems later.
Your microphone should be suited to your recording equipment and to the sort of recording you
are doing. Poor quality equipment will introduce noise into your recording, interfering with the
signal that you are trying to capture. An omni-directional mic picks up sound from all directions
and is good for recording background noise, music from several directions, or several people
talking. A uni-directional mic is better for sound coming from a single source - one speaker,
one instrument, etc. Clip-on mics can do a great job recording individuals in conversations, but
if you have more than one or two participants, you may need to think about mixing to control
different sound levels. Table mics will pick up the sound of someone touching or bumping into
a table, so subjects need to take care if you use these. Microphones that are built-in to a tape
recorder or camcorder tend to pick up machine vibrations (more noise) and are difficult to place
close enough to a subject. A long microphone cable may act as an antenna that could pick up
static or even a local radio station. If a microphone's specifications include "signal to noise
ratio", a high signal to noise ratio will sound best. Sound is made when objects vibrate
producing pressure waves that can be picked up by our ears. These waves can be picked up
when they vibrate the membrane of a microphone and can be created by the vibrations of the
membrane in a speaker. If we graph the intensity of the wave, or the motion of the microphone
membrane, over time, we will get a smooth waveform curve in which the frequency of a sound
is the number of peaks per second (Hertz). The distance between two peaks is the
wavelength. As with most physical properties (e.g. temperature, pressure, velocity, the shape of
the groove of an LP), this is an analog signal: between any two points in time we might make
infinite number of different measurements, between any two intensities there can be an infinite
number of different values. Although the graph shown below is very simple, waveforms can be
quite complex because many different frequencies are usually present simultaneously (a spectral
graph will show the distribution of frequencies in a sound).
When we store the signal in a computer, we need to represent the analog signal by a digital
approximation that we can think of as a series of numbers representing samples of the height of
the analog curve. Computers by their nature have space for a limited number of measurements
and each value can have a precision limited by the space allotted to each number. In this way a
series of numbers can be used to produce a signal that approximates the original analog signal.
The more numbers you have (sampling rate in kHz) and the more precise those number are
(resolution of each sample in bits), the more the digital sound will resemble the original, but the
larger your sound files will be.
The advantages of digital recordings is that the sound can be manipulated computationally, there
is no degradation from an original to a copy, and the signal can be sent for long distances over
telecommunications links without picking up noise. The disadvantage of digital representation is
that digital is always just an approximation of the real sound (though the approximation may be
so close that our ears can't hear the difference).
The sound card in a computer can create sound, process sound from input sources, and send
sound to output destinations. A sound recorder may capture sound from a microphone (mic in)
or from an audio device (line in). It is possible to control which source will be used by opening
the entertainment accessory called volume control (start / all programs / accessories /
entertainmnet). This utility controls the output or playback volume of a number of devices
(microphone, line in, CD audio, midi, wave, etc.).
By resetting the options/properties from playback to recording, the input source (mic, line in,
CD, midi) may be selected. If you are recording from a microphone, you may need to check
that the mic is selected here and that the mic volume is adequate but not too loud. You have to
play with it to see what works for your current recording conditions.
The simplest way to make a recording using Windows' built-in tools is to open the
entertainment accessory, (start / all programs / accessories / entertainmnet) Sound Recorder.
Click on the red recording dot to begin. Save the file in .WAV format using File / Save, and be
sure to select File / New to begin another recording from scratch. Under the menu (Edit /
Audio Properties / Customize) it is possible to select a particular frequency and resolution other
than the old default 22,050 Hz 8 bit mono. The best frequency and resolution are always a
tradeoff between quality and size. Music is more demanding than voice. We recommend using
at least 22,000 Hz 16 bit for projects in this class.
Cool-Edit 2000
A much greater degree of control and more extensive features for manipulating sound files are
available in sophisticated sound applications such as Cool Edit 2000, Cool Edit Pro (now
Adobe Audition), and Sound Forge. The first two features needed are selecting and cropping a
sound as you might a photo and saving the sound in a variety of formats commonly supported
by multimedia applications and WWW browsers.
The Edit / Trim menu will crop (or trim) a selected portion of the sound. File / Save
as... offers a wide variety of options including .AU .WAV, .RA (RealAudio), and .Mp3.
Real Player and Mp3 use excellent compression utilities to make file size smaller while
maintaining very good sound quality.
2.1.2 TTS (Text To Speech)
TTS stands for Text To Speech. With TTS program we can make digital audio files without
converting from analog inputs to digital audio. In the class we’ve seen three different TTS
program source. I’m going to show one of them which is called Neospeech. We can use this
on the website as trial version. This provides several languages so that users can choose one
of them.
This TTS program can be use just to hear but if you have recording program you can record
as mp3 or wav file too. Putting on the webpage you can create more effective webpage
especially if you want to give some lectures or information using voice instead of text only.
4. Computer Animation and Video
3.1 AVI
AVI, an acronym for Audio Video Interleave, is a multimedia container format introduced by
Microsoft in November 1992, as part of the Video for Windows technology. AVI files contain
both audio and video data in a standard container that allows simultaneous playback. Like
DVDs, AVI files support multiple audio and video streams, although these features are rarely
used. Most AVI files also use the file format extensions developed by the Matrox OpenDML
group in February 1996. These files are supported by Microsoft, and are known unofficially as
"AVI 2.0". It is a special case of the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF), which divides
the file's data up into data blocks called "chunks". Each "chunk" is identified by a FourCC tag.
An AVI file takes the form of a single chunk in an RIFF formatted file, which is then
subdivided into two mandatory "chunks" and one optional "chunk". The first sub-chunk is
identified by the "hdrl" tag. This chunk is the file header and contains metadata about the video
such as the width, height and the number of frames. The second sub-chunk is identified by the
"movi" tag. This chunk contains the actual audio/visual data that make up the AVI movie. The
third optional sub-chunk is identified by the "idx1" tag and indexes the location of the data
chunks within the file. By way of the RIFF format, the audio/visual data contained in the "movi"
chunk can be encoded or decoded by a software module called a codec. The codec translates
between raw data and the data format inside the chunk. An AVI file may therefore carry
audio/visual data inside the chunks in almost any compression scheme, including: Full Frames
(Uncompressed), Intel Real Time Video, Indeo, Cinepak, Motion JPEG, Editable MPEG,
VDOWave, ClearVideo / RealVideo, QPEG, MPEG-4, XviD, DivX and others.
4.1
MOV
A QuickTime file (*.mov) functions as a multimedia container file that contains one or more
tracks, each of which store a particular type of data, such as audio, video, effects, or text (for
subtitles, for example). Each track in turn contains track media, either the digitally encoded
media stream (using a specific codec such as Cinepak, Sorenson codec, MP3, JPEG, DivX, or
PNG) or a data reference to the media stored in another file or elsewhere on a network. It also
has an "edit list" that indicates what parts of the media to use. Internally, QuickTime files
maintain this format as a tree-structure of "atoms", each of which uses a 4-byte OSType
identifier to determine its structure. An atom can be a parent to other atoms or it can contain
data, but it cannot do both. Apple's plans for HyperCard 3.0 illustrate the versatility of
QuickTime's file format. The designers of Hypercard 3.0 originally intended to store the
equivalent of an entire HyperCard stack (similar in structure to a complete web site, with
graphics, buttons and scripts) as a QuickTime interactive file. The ability to contain abstract
data references for the media data, and the separation of the media data from the media offsets
and the track edit lists means that QuickTime is particularly suited for editing, as it is capable of
importing and editing in place (without data copying) other formats such as AIFF, DV, MP3,
MPEG-1, and AVI. Other later-developed media container formats such as Microsoft's
Advanced Streaming Format or the open source Ogg and Matroska containers lack this
abstraction, and require all media data to be rewritten after editing
4.2
MPG-1,2,4
Bringing video pictures into the digital era introduces one major problem. Uncompressed digital
video pictures take up enormous amounts of information. If you were to record digital video to a
CD without compression, it could only hold about five minutes, and that's without any sound !
MPEG reduces the amount of data needed to represent video many times over, but still manages
to retain very high picture quality.
MPEG stands for Motion Picture Expert Group, which is established at 1988, consists of some
300 experts take part in MPEG meetings, and the number of people working on MPEG-related
matters without attending meetings is even larger. The MPEG committee which originated the
MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards that made Digital Television possible, is currently developing
MPEG-4 with wide industry participation. MPEG-4 will become Committee Draft in October
1997 and Draft International Standard in December 1998. The first standard developed by the
group, nicknamed MPEG-1, was the coding of the combined audio-visual signal at a bitrate
around 1.5 Mbit/s. This was motivated by the prospect that was becoming apparent in 1988, that
it was possible to store video signals on a compact disc with a quality comparable to VHS
cassettes.
So how does MPEG reduce data by that much and not effect the picture quality?
The illusion of movement in TV and cinema pictures is actually created by showing a sequence
of still pictures in quick succession, each picture changing a small amount from the one before.
We cannot detect the individual pictures - our brain 'smoothes' the action out. A dumb analogue
TV picture sends every part of every picture, but digital MPEG video is much smarter. It looks
at two pictures and works out how much of the picture is the same in both. Because pictures
don't change much from one to the next, there is quite a lot of repetition. The parts that are
repeated don't need to be saved or sent, because they already exist in a previous picture. These
parts can be thrown out. Digital video also contains components our eyes can't see, so these can
be thrown out as well. Certain sections of video are more complicated than other sections. When
there is lots of action and fine detail it's much more difficult to encode properly than a slow
moving scene with large areas of the same colour or texture in the picture. MPEG deals with
this by concentrating its efforts and data use on the complicated parts. This means that the video
is encoded in the best possible way. MPEG-1, formally known as ISO/IEC 11172, is a standard
in 5 parts. The first three parts are Systems, Video and Audio, in that order. Two more parts
complete the suite of MPEG-1 standards: Conformance Testing, which specifies the
methodology for verifying claims of conformance to the standard by manufacturers of
equipment and producers of bitstreams, and Software Simulation, a full C-language
implementation of the MPEG-1 standard (encoder and decoder). Manifold have been the
implementations of the MPEG-1 standard: from software implementations running on a
consumer-grade PC of today in real time, to single boards for PCs, to the so-called Video CD
etc. The last product has become a market success in some countries: in China alone millions of
Video CD decoders have already been sold. MPEG-1 content is used for such services as DAB
(Digital Audio Broadcasting) and is the standard format on the Internet for quality video.
4.3
ASF
Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format) is Microsoft's proprietary
digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media. ASF is part
of the Windows Media framework. The format does not specify how the video or audio should
be encoded, but instead just specifies the structure of the video/audio stream. What this means is
that ASF files can be encoded with basically any audio/video codec and still would be in ASF
format. This is similar to the function performed by the QuickTime, AVI, or Ogg formats. One
of the objectives of the ASF format was to support playback from digital media servers, HTTP
servers, and local storage devices. The ASF format is based on serialized objects which are
essentially byte-sequences identified by a GUID marker. The most common filetypes contained
within an ASF file are Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV).
ASF files can also contain objects representing metadata, such as the artist, title, album and
genre for an audio track, or the director of a video track, much like the ID3 tags of MP3 files.
Files containing only WMA audio can be named using a .wma extension, and files of only audio
and video content may have the extension .wmv. Both may use the .asf extension if desired. The
format is often confused with Microsoft's own implementation of MPEG-4 video format
(Windows Media Video), because most ASF streams are encoded using this codec. The ASF
container structure is patented in the United States (United States Patent 6,041,345 Levi, et al.
March 21, 2000) by Microsoft. They have invoked this patent against VirtualDub, a free video
conversion program. Interestingly, Apple's iTunes software now has the capability to convert
WMA files to any iTunes supported encoder. The ASF container provides the framework for
digital rights management in Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video. An analysis
of an older scheme used in WMA reveals that it is using a combination of elliptic curve
cryptography key exchange, DES block cipher, a custom block cipher, RC4 stream cipher and
the SHA-1 hashing function. ASF files have MIME type application/vnd.ms-asf or video/x-msasf. (Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX) files also have MIME type video/x-ms-asf.) The ASF
container is usually streamed on the net through Microsoft's proprietary MMS protocol.
4.4
WMV
Windows Media Video (WMV) is a generic name for the set of video codec technologies
developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. The codecs were
originally developed as proprietary codecs for low-bitrate streaming applications. However, in
2003 Microsoft drafted a video codec specification based on its Windows Media Video version
9 codec and submitted it to SMPTE for standardization. The standard was officially approved in
March 2006 as SMPTE 421M, thus making the Windows Media Video 9 codec no longer a
proprietary technology. Earlier versions of the codec (7 and 8) are still considered proprietary as
they fall outside the SMPTE 421M standard.
WMV is not built solely on Microsoft in-house technology. It is believed that WMV version 7
(WMV1) was built upon Microsoft's own non-standard version of MPEG-4 Part 2. However, as
WMV version 9 has been standardized as an independent SMPTE standard (421M, also known
as VC-1), it's reasonable to believe that WMV has sufficiently evolved in a different direction
than MPEG-4 to be considered a unique codec in its own right. There are currently (April 2006)
16 companies in the VC-1 patent pool. Microsoft is also one of the members of the MPEG-4
AVC/H.264 patent pool. The video stream is often combined with an audio stream of Windows
Media Audio and encapsulated in Advanced Systems Format files, carrying the .wmv or .asf file
extensions. WMV files are played by players such as MPlayer or Windows Media Player, the
latter being only available for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh systems. Many third-party
players exist for various platforms such as Linux that use the FFmpeg implementation of the
WMV codecs. WMV is generally packed into an Advanced Systems Format (ASF) container. It
can also be put into AVI or Matroska container formats. The resulting files may be named .avi if
it is an AVI-contained file, or .wmv or .asf if it is an ASF file, or .mkv if it is an MKV file.
WMV can be stored in an AVI file when encoding with the VirtualDub encoder and using the
WMV9 VCM codec implementation. Microsoft's Windows Media Player for the Mac does not
support all WMV encoded files since it supports only the ASF file container. More files can be
played with Flip4Mac and Quicktime or MPlayer for MacOSX. When encapsulated in ASF file
format, WMV can support digital rights management facilities intended to protect intellectual
property rights. Besides being one of the most popular codecs for distributing video on the
Internet, the codec is also used to distribute high definition video on standard DVDs in a format
Microsoft has branded as WMV HD. This WMV HD content can be played back on computers
or compatible DVD players.
4.5
Windows Media Encoler 9
Windows Media Encoder is a powerful tool for content producers who want to capture audio
and video content using the many innovations in Windows Media, including high-quality
multichannel sound, high-definition video quality, and support for mixed-mode voice and music
content. The below figure is showing Windows Media Encoder when I run the program. Using
the program we can capture the screen, video, and audio also. We can choose the tasks by
clicking the session icon and the program will show the other icons so that users can choose
what they want to do. As mentioned above this program will provide well organized video and
audio output and make user use the output files to put on the websites or share with friends or
colleagues in a company.
< Windows Media Encoder 9>
Final Project task no.2 (for Ali)
http://altawilcommnets.blogspot.com/
The most important part of creating a webpage is text but some times we need to add other
materials to make the webpage look good and give other information using multimedia
technology. Besides text contents we can see photos, sound effects, and even video links on the
variety websites. In the class Dr. Alam have been teaching us how to create the web based
pushing material and we had completed the project 1 and 2 to show how to use the tools to
create our own webpages. After project 2 we’ve been taught how to add images, sounds, and
videos into a webpage. To give additional comments about the course I’m going to review the
last part of lectures and add some further information on it. I’ll separate the contents into 3 parts.
Images and pictures, Audio, and Video parts will be introduced separately. Some of examples
will be completed to have the other tasks done. For Image part Gimp and SVG plug-In will be
used, for Audio part Crazy talk will be tested, and for Video part Windows Media Encoder will
be demonstrated in the task 1 & 2.
Images and Pictures
Graphic images that have been processed by a computer can usually be divided into two distinct
categories. Such images are either bitmap files or vector graphics. If you work in prepress, you
need a good comprehension on the advantages and disadvantages of both types of data. These
pages try to explain these differences.
As a general rule scanned images are bitmap files while drawings made in applications like
Corel Draw or Illustrator are saved as vector graphics. But you can convert images between
these two data types and it is even possible to mix them in a file. This sometimes confuses
people.
Images and Pictures are taking most important parts of a webpage. Most of webpages are
showing logos, pictures and some pictures. In order to make effect on them we have to consider
what kinds of images we can see and how to handle with them. There are actually two types of
images. One is pixel based image and the other one is vector based images. All images display
on a computer screen as a grid of pixels of various colors. The image files that contain these
images store that image data in one of two fundamentally different ways:
Pixel Based Images ( Bitmapped Images)
Bitmaps images are exactly what their name says they are: a collection of bits that form an
image. The image consists of a matrix of individual dots (or pixels) that all have their own
colour (described using bits, the smallest possible units of information for a computer).
Lets take a look at a typical bitmap image to demonstrate the principle:
To the left you see an image and to the right a 250 percent enlargement of the top of one of the
mountains. As you can see the image consists of hundreds of rows and columns of small
elements that all have their own colour. One such element is called a pixel -short for picture
element). The human eye is not capable of seeing each individual pixel so we perceive a picture
with smooth gradations.
The number of pixels you need to get a realistic looking image depends on the way the image
will be used. One of the next pages goes into this in more detail.
Types of bitmap images
Bitmap images can contain any number of colours but we distinguish between four main
categories:
1. Line-art. These are images that only contain two colours, usually black and white.
Sometimes these images are referred to as bitmaps because a computer has to use only 1
bit (on=black, off=white) to define each pixel.
2. Grayscale images, which contain various shades of grey as well as pure black and white.
3. Multitones: such images contain shades of two or more colours. The most popular
multitone images are duotones, which usually consist of black and a second spot colour
(often an Pantone colour). The example below contains black and Pantone Warm Red.
4. Full colour images. The colour information can be described using a number of colour
spaces: RGB, CMYK or Lab for instance. These are discussed in more detail on this
page (not yet available).
Characteristics of bitmap data
Bitmap data can take up a lot of room. A CMYK A4-size picture that is optimized for medium
quality printing (150 lpi) takes up 40 MB. Compression can reduce the size of the file.
The image with the enlargement showed one of the main disadvantages of bitmap images: once
they are enlarged to much, they look unnatural and blocky. But reducing a picture too much also
has a bad influence as it looses sharpness.
Bitmaps are fairly simple to output, as long as your RIP or printer has sufficient memory. Old
PostScript level 1 devices could get into trouble when images (especially line-art) were rotated
but the newest hard- and software has enough processing power to handle any effect without
troubles.
Applications that can handle bitmap data
There are hundreds of applications on the market that can be used to create or modify bitmap
data. In prepress, one application, Adobe PhotoShop, completely dominates the market. This
doesn't mean that cheaper alternatives like Corel Photo-Paint, should be disregarded.
File formats that are used for bitmap data
Bitmap data can be saved in a wide variety of file formats. Among these are:

BMP: limited file format that is not suitable for use in prepress.

EPS: flexible file format that can contain both bitmap and vector data.

GIF: mainly used for internet graphics

JPEG: or rather the JFIF file format, which is mainly used for internet graphics

PDF: versatile file format that can contain just about any type of data including
complete pages, not yet widely used to exchange just images

PICT: file format that can contain both bitmap and vector data but that is mainly used
on Macintosh computers and is not very suitable for prepress.

TIFF: the most popular bitmap file format in prepress
Vector Based Images
Vector graphics are images that are completely described using mathematical definitions. The
image below shows the principle. To the left you see the image itself and to the right you see the
actual lines that make up the drawing.
Each individual line is made up of either a vast collection of points with lines interconnecting
all of them or just a few control points that are connected using so called bezier curves. It is this
latter method that generates the best results and that is used by most drawing programs.
This drawing demonstrates the two principles. To the left a circle is formed by connecting a
number of points using straight lines. To the right, you see the same circle that is now drawn
using 4 points (nodes) only.
Characteristics of vector drawings
Vector drawings are usually pretty small files because they only contain data about the bezier
curves that form the drawing. The EPS-file format that is often used to store vector drawings
includes a bitmap preview image along the bezier data. The filesize of this preview image is
usually larger than the actual bezier data themselves.
Vector drawings can usually be scaled without any loss in quality. This makes them ideal for
company logo's, maps or other objects that have to be resized frequently. Please note that not all
vector drawings can be scaled as much as you like:

Drawings containing trapping information can only be scaled up to 20 percent larger or
smaller.

Thin lines may disappear if a vector drawing is reduced too much.

Small errors in a drawing may become visible as soon as it is enlarged too much.
It is fairly easy to create a vector based drawing that is very difficult to output. Especially the
use of tiles (small objects that are repeated dozens or hundreds of times) and Corel Draw lens
effects can lead to very complex files.
Applications that can handle vector data
There are hundreds of applications on the market that can be used to create or modify vector
data. In prepress, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw and Macromedia Freehand are the most popular.
File formats that are used for vector data
Bitmap data can be saved in a wide variety of file formats. Among these are:

EPS: the most popular file format to exchange vector drawings although EPS-files can
also contain bitmap data.

PDF: versatile file format that can contain just about any type of data including
complete pages, not yet widely used to exchange just images

PICT: file format that can contain both bitmap and vector data but that is mainly used
on Macintosh computers.
.
Scalar Vector Graphics(SVG)
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional
vector graphics, both static and animated (either declarative or scripted). It is an open standard
created by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is also responsible for standards like HTML
and XHTML.
SVG allows three types of graphic objects:

Vector graphic shapes (e.g. paths consisting of straight lines and curves, and areas
bounded by them)

Raster graphics images / digital images

Text
Graphical objects can be grouped, styled, transformed and composited into previously rendered
objects. Text can be in any XML namespace suitable to the application, which enhances
searchability and accessibility of the SVG graphics. The feature set includes nested
transformations, clipping paths, alpha masks, filter effects, template objects and extensibility.
SVG drawings can be dynamic and interactive. The Document Object Model (DOM) for SVG,
which includes the full XML DOM, allows straightforward and efficient vector graphics
animation via ECMAScript or SMIL. A rich set of event handlers such as onmouseover and
onclick can be assigned to any SVG graphical object. Because of its compatibility and
leveraging of other Web standards, features like scripting can be done on SVG elements and
other XML elements from different namespaces simultaneously within the same web page. An
extreme example of this is a complete tetris game implemented as an SVG object, found here!
(The link requires an SVG enabled browser.)
If storage space is an issue, SVG images can be saved with gzip compression, in which case
they may be called "SVGZ files". Because XML contains verbose text, it tends to compress very
well and these files can be much smaller. Often however the original vector-file (SVG) is
already smaller than the rasterised version.
Impact on the Web
The widespread adoption of SVG clients, particularly those natively embedded in web browsers
(as it is in Firefox and Opera), may bring a significant new look-and-feel to the World Wide
Web. A current trend is to build dynamic web sites that behave somewhat like desktop
applications, utilizing the Ajax technique. SVG enhances the capabilities of Ajax, by providing
a rich, graphical set of page elements, well beyond those specified by HTML/CSS. The SVG
Terminal module for Firefox is an early example of this.
Support for SVG in browsers and other applications
The use of SVG on the web is in its infancy. There is a great deal of inertia from the long-time
use of pure raster formats and other formats like Macromedia Flash or Java applets, but also
browser support is still uneven, with native support in Opera, Firefox and Safari but Internet
Explorer requiring a plugin. Web sites which serve SVG images typically also provide the
images in a raster format, either automatically by HTTP content negotiation or allowing the user
to directly choose the file. Alternative images are usually automatically rasterised using a library
such as ImageMagick, which provides a quick but incomplete implementation of SVG, or Batik,
which implements all SVG except declarative animation but requires the Java Runtime
Environment.
Some wikis have experimented with SVG support; it has been speculated that since SVG is a
text-based format, a wiki might allow edits to SVG images in a fashion similar to editing a
standard article. However, the benefits of editing images in this way are disputed. It is generally
considered that even trivial editing is better achieved using a separate graphics package because
it is difficult to visualise exactly how changes to the XML will appear on the final image.
Current wikis mostly do not support either the display or editing of SVG images, partly because
of the lack of full browser support, but also because rasterization using Batik is CPU-intensive
and requires Sun's Java Runtime Environment, which is not free (as in freedom). In the spirit of
being open, many wikis refuse to use non-free software; for example Jimbo Wales speaks about
this in his weblog. SVG support would be valuable to a wiki, especially for articles that require
diagrams, so the situation may change in the future, when ImageMagick is expanded to cover
more of the SVG standard, and work on allowing Batik to run on a completely free Java
implementation is complete. Wikipedia currently supports the SVG format.
Plugin support
In browsers such as Internet Explorer and Safari, a plugin is needed to view SVG content. The
most widely available SVG plugin on the desktop is from Adobe Systems (the Adobe SVG
Viewer) which supports most of SVG 1.0/1.1. The current version of Safari ships with the
plugin, while Internet Explorer users must separately download it.
The example of SVG is as follow
before the zoom in and after zoom in
As you can see there is no quality change at all. This is one of the advantages of Vector based
Image and thanks for SVG we can see these images on webbrowser.
Panoramas
Quick Time VR (QTVR) enable us to look around the images using our own mouse or touchpad.
This technology have changed the concept of 2D photos which had whown limited arrage of the
object. We can see 360 degree of the scean. QuickTime VR photographs let you feel like you're
standing in the spot where the photo was taken. "VR" stands for "Virtual Reality" because you
can use your computer's mouse to spin around in a 360 degree circle. A single QuickTime
photograph actually consists of 12 photographs taken in a 360-degree circle and then "stitched"
together to create the final QuickTime VR.
You'll need the free QuickTime VR plug-in to access the panoramas. Once you have the plug-in,
click on the photos to the right to see the VR.
It's easy to navigate through the VR: click and drag with your mouse (left mouse button for PC
users) to move around in the photo. Use your shift key to zoom in; use your control key to zoom
out.
Image Editing Programs
There are two image editing programs that we have to take a look at. One is for pixel based
pictures and the other is vector based pictures. Gimp and Inkspace are all free software so we
can just download and use them. These two programs have almost same functions as other
commercial programs have.
Gimp(for pixel based pictures)
The GNU Image Manipulation Program or just GIMP is a Free Software bitmap graphics editor,
a program for creating and processing raster graphics. It also has some support for vector
graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now
maintained by a group of volunteers; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program. Its creators, Spencer Kimball
and Petter Mattis, initially started GIMP as a semester-long project for a class at UC Berkeley.
Both were integral members of eXperimental Computing Facility, a student club at Berkeley
(the GIMP's file extension, XCF, is taken from the initials of this club). In 1997, after both
Kimball and Mattis had graduated from Berkeley, the name was changed to GNU Image
Manipulation Program when it became an official GNU project.
GIMP can be used to process digital graphics and photographs. Typical uses include creating
graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, changing colors, combining images using a
layer paradigm, removing unwanted image features, and converting between different image
formats. GIMP can also be used to create simple animated images.
GIMP is also notable to some as the first major free software end-user application. Previous free
software projects, such as GCC and the Linux kernel, were mainly tools created by
programmers for programmers. GIMP is considered by some to be proof that the free software
development process can create things non-geeks can use productively, and as such
psychologically paved the way for such efforts as KDE, GNOME, Mozilla Firefox,
OpenOffice.org, and various other applications that followed.
Inkspace (for vector based image)
We can download Inkspace from http://www.inkscape.org. After the installation we can use this
program to create vector based image. Whenever you’re done you can save the file as SVG
format and can open with webbrowser and zoom in too.
I created a simple symbols and zoomed in using IE. You can see there is no quality drop.
Photo Album Programs (Jalbum)
Jalbum allows us to make web photo album. We don’t need to create HTML file ourselves or to
use HTMP Editing program. All that we need to do is just to designate the folders in which the
photos are then Jalbum will create the album folder as a sub folder under the current photo
folder. If you look at the folder you’ll see the html file and other photos. If you want to upload
the file you can do that using FTP program.
Sound files

MP3: A sound file that has been compressed through MP3 encoding, making the
files smaller and easier to send across the Internet.

WAV: An uncompressed Windows audio file. WAV files occupy an incredible
amount of disk space, thus the need for compressed formats, such as MP3.

WMA: The Windows Media Player format, which (according to independent testing)
sounds as good as MP3 at half the bit rate (and therefore half the file size).

VQF:
A compression algorithm developed by Yamaha that is similar to MP3 yet
occupies less hard drive space. Find out more at VQF.com

AIFF:
An uncompressed Macintosh audio file. WAV files occupy an incredible
amount of disk space, thus the need for compressed formats, such as MP3s.

codec:
A codec is an algorithm for compressing and decompressing audio and video
files without losing a significant amount of information. Once a file has been
compressed by a codec like MP3 or RealAudio, it is smaller and easier to transmit
across the Web, and still sounds fairly true to the original.

MPEG

(Moving Pictures Experts Group) : MPEG is a standard for compressing sound and
movie files into an attractive format for downloading--or even streaming--across the
Internet. The MPEG-1 standard streams video and sound data at 150 kilobytes per
second--the same rate as a single-speed CD-ROM drive--which it manages by taking
key frames of video and filling only the areas that change between the frames.

Firmware:
The operating system and software installed on a portable device.
Some MP3 players have upgradable firmware, meaning that their operating systems
can be updated to support future audio codecs or make small performance tweaks such
as improved power efficiency.

S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface):
A standard format used for transferring
data between two digital audio devices over (more commonly) a standard RCA cable
or (less commonly) an optical cable.

jukebox:
A multipurpose audio program that usually incorporates an audio
player, a ripper, an encoder, and a file organizer.

MIDI:
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a protocol that allows
electronic musical instruments to talk to each other and to computers. Because MIDI
files contain only a series of commands (such as note on, note off), they are very small
and efficient. On the other hand, they have no sound of their own, and must be used in
conjunction with a wavetable, a synthesizer, or a drum machine.

Flash memory:
Small, flat, solid-state type of memory used in MP3 players, digital
cameras, and PDAs. It comprises CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, pendrive,
and microdrive; it is an expensive form of storage.

Watermark:
A unique inaudible code, which is inserted into an audio file in order
to identify the first person who legally purchased the file. If you buy a watermarked
MP3 and then distribute it over the Internet, the RIAA will be able to tell that you are
the person who originally broke copyright law and distributed the file. Watermarks
have yet to be deployed by the SDMI.

Ripper: Software that digitally yanks tunes from your CDs and turns them into files
on your computer (WAV files in Windows, AIFF files on a Mac).
There are many ways to add audio to your webpage. We'll cover a few simple methods here.
Linking to an audio file
The simplest way is probably to link to an audio file. When a user clicks on the link, the file is
downloaded and (usually) played by a plug-in in the user's browser. For example:
Html example to link to an audio file
Embedding audio with the Embed tag
The "embed" tag can be used to add audio with some minimal controls to your webpage. The
"src" field indicates the location of the audio file to be played. The "loop" field indicates
whether to loop the audio file. The "hidden" field indicates whether transport controls should be
hidden.
For example, here's a webpage that loads and plays an annoying looping background sound:
Example with looping background sound
So that can be pretty annoying. It's best to use hidden looping sounds sparingly. The default for
the "loop" field is false. If the "autostart" field is true, then the audio plays once and does not
loop. The default for the "hidden" field is true; transport controls will be displayed on the
webpage, and the user can control the audio. For example:
Example with autostart and transport control
Using the QuickTime Player/Plug-in
QuickTime is a powerful media player available for Macs and PCs. Your browser's default
audio player will handle many common audio file formats. However, there are advantages to
specifying in your webpage a cross-platform plug-in player like QuickTime. QuickTime plays
most of the common audio formats, and a variety of video formats (which will not convern us).
It can also handle MIDI files (but you have to import them into QuickTime format first). It can
be configured to use the Roland GS instrument set, which is a nice General MIDI software
synthesizer that comes with QuickTime. QuickTime's Fast Start feature enables a file to start
playing while it is downloading, which is handy for playing, for example, MP3 files over a
dialup connection. The way the webpage is displayed also becomes pretty consistent across
platforms.
If you do not have QuickTime already, download the free version from:
QuickTime download and install it. The QuickTime Pro 4 Player, which has more capabilities
than the free version, is available in the lab (contact instructor if you can't find it). In addition to
playing most of the common formats, yit also allows a user to save as some common formats at
variable bit rates; I find it to be a useful audio converter even when I'm not working with
QuickTime. The "embed" tag is also used to embed audio or other media for the QuickTime
player. However, a browser's default plugin for handling audio may not be QuickTime.
Fortunately, a browser can be "tricked" into invoking the QuickTime plugin by specifying a
dummy .qti file for the "src" parameter, and using the "qtsrc" parameter to indicate the real
audio file that should be played.
TTS (Text To Speech)
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A system used for this purpose is
termed a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. Speech synthesis
systems are often called text-to-speech (TTS) systems in reference to their ability to convert text
into speech. However, there exist systems that instead render symbolic linguistic representations
like phonetic transcriptions into speech.
A text-to-speech system (or engine) is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end.
Broadly, the front-end takes input in the form of text and outputs a symbolic linguistic
representation. The back-end takes the symbolic linguistic representation as input and outputs
the synthesized speech waveform.
The front-end has two major tasks. First it takes the raw text and converts things like numbers
and abbreviations into their written-out word equivalents. This process is often called text
normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization. Then it assigns phonetic transcriptions to each
word, and divides and marks the text into various prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and
sentences. The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme
(TTP) or grapheme-to-phoneme (GTP) conversion. The combination of phonetic transcriptions
and prosody information make up the symbolic linguistic representation output of the front end.
The other part, the back-end, takes the symbolic linguistic representation and converts it into
actual sound output. The back end is often referred to as the synthesizer.
Computer Animation and Video
Bit Depth
The bit depth determines the number of colors that will be used to export the movie. Higher bit
depths create larger files. When you specify lower bit depths, you may be able to retain some
control over color quality by specifying a custom color palette. If the option is not available,
you've chosen a codec that doesn't support custom palettes or 8-bit color.
Frame size
For best picture quality, the frame size of the project should match the frame size of the final
video file. Where file size or data rate are more important than picture quality, such as for
Internet delivery, reducing the frame size may help compression by reducing the initial amount
of data to compress.
Frame rate
For best motion quality, the frame rate of the project should match the frame rate of the final
video file. Where file size or data rate are more important than the quality of motion, such as for
Internet delivery, specifying a lower frame rate may help compression by reducing the amount
of data to compress.
Compression:
Short for compressor/decompressor, a codec is any technology for compressing and
decompressing data. Codecs can be implemented in software, hardware, or a combination of
both. Some popular codecs for computer video include MPEG, Indeo and Cinepak. "A codec is
an algorithm, or specialized computer program, that reduces the number of bytes consumed by
large files and programs. In order to minimize the amount of storage space required for a
complicated file, such as a video, compression is used. Compression works by eliminating
redundancies in data. Compression can reduce the size of a file by a factor of 100 or more in
some cases. For example, a 15-megabyte video might be reduced to 150 kilobytes Prior to
transmission, the codec converts analog signals to digital signals and compresses the digital
signals. Incoming audio and video must be decompressed and converted from digital back to
analog. The compression method may be proprietary or standards-based.
Applying the best compression settings can be tricky. The goal is to apply the degree of
compression that lets the clip stay within—but not too far below—the target data rate. If you
apply too little compression, the data rate will be too high for the system, causing errors such as
dropped frames. If you apply too much compression, lowering the data rate too far, you won't be
taking advantage of the full capacity of the system and the picture quality may suffer
unnecessarily.
Some codecs use lossless compression, which ensures that all of the information in the original
clip is preserved after compression. This maintains the full quality of the original, which makes
lossless compression useful for final-cut editing or moving clips between systems. However,
preserving the original level of quality limits the degree to which you can lower the data rate
and file size, and the resulting data rate may be too high for smooth playback on many systems.
Lossy compression methods discard some of the original data during compression. For example,
if the pixels making up a sky actually contain 78 shades of blue, a lossy codec set for less-thanbest quality may record 60 shades of blue. Lossy codecs usually let you specify how much
picture quality you want to trade to lower the data rate and file size so that you can tailor
playback for your audience. Lossy compression allows much lower data rates and file sizes than
lossless compression, so lossy codecs are commonly used for final production of video
delivered using CD-ROM or the Internet.
Different codecs require various amounts of time to compress or decompress video. A codec is
considered symmetrical when it requires the same amount of time to compress as to decompress
a clip. A codec is asymmetrical when the times required to compress and decompress a clip are
significantly different. For example, the Cinepak asymmetrical codec decompresses video
relatively quickly, making it useful for video files that must play well on both high- and low-end
computers, but to achieve this it requires more time when compressing. Symmetry varies
depending on the codec and is generally not adjustable within a codec.
Codec Problems:
The MOST COMMON reason that a video file will not play is that the video codec
(compressor/decompressor) used by the file is not installed on the system being used to attempt
to play the file. Usually, the Windows operating system, Windows Media Player, or the
application that you are using will report an error indicating that the codec is not present or that
it cannot find the codec needed. Video codecs are identified by a four character code such as
IV50 or DVSD.
DivX:
When you install a video codec on your computer, what you really are doing is giving your
media player instructions how to compress/decompress video in that file format. The DivX
codec is based on the MPEG-4 compression format, which is a new standard of video
compression that is both high quality and low bitrate. This basically means that it produces high
quality video using a low amount of bits (space). Despite the fact that DivX movies are faster to
encode than regular MPEG movies they are much smaller in size due to the incredible
compression technology. DivX video is usually combined with MP3 sound to produce both high
quality video and audio.
The DivX codec makes it possible for anyone with a computer and a broadband connection to
download DVD quality movies and store them on a single CD-ROM. In the beginning this was
the primary use of the DivX codec but as time has passed, people have discovered that it has
more uses. DivX is today well on its way to becoming a new standard for video just as MP3 has
taken over the world of music.
Apple QuickTime (MOV)
QuickTime is the multi-platform industry-standard multimedia architecture used by software
tool vendors and content creators to create and deliver synchronized graphics, sound, video, text
and music. Developed by Apple, it has become one of the most widely used formats on the
World Wide Web. QuickTime movies can be compressed using software packages such as
Adobe Premiere of Media Cleaner Pro to sizes that are feasible for use over the Internet.
Most CD-ROMs use Quicktime movies and there are several sites on the Internet that make use
of the format. The images are of higher quality, but file sizes can be significantly larger than
other video storage formats. You can use an application such as Adobe Premiere to convert a
file to QuickTime format or your video card may allow you to capture directly in the
format.
QuickTime movies can be “flattened” (a particular arrangement of data in the file) so
that they can be viewed on both a Macintosh and a PC.
Microsoft AVI Video (AVI)
AVI is a format for video files that offers minimal compression ability and is available on the
Windows platform only. It is widely used on the World Wide Web. AVI Files are a special case
of RIFF files. RIFF is the Resource Interchange File Format. This is a general purpose format
for exchanging multimedia data types that was defined by Microsoft and IBM during their long
forgotten alliance.
Because AVI is not compressed with one specific codec, rather it is a file that can be
compressed by any one of hundreds of codecs like DivX, MPEG-4v2, Indeo 3.2, Cinepak to
name a few, it makes the file hard to play. In Windows it is rather easy to play an AVI file IF
you have the correct codec installed. There is a whole lot of Windows applications available that
can play AVI files like Windows Media Player. Unfortunately If you do not have the codec
needed to play the file Windows Media Player will not be able to play it.
MPEG Video- (MPEG)
MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group, is the nickname given to a family of
International Standards used for coding audio-visual information in a digital compressed format.
The MPEG family of standards includes MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. MPEG-1 is the
format that is widely used for video files. It is a compressed file format that allows for the
highest quality digitized video playback available. Full NTSC (TV) resolution with 30
frames/second is available on virtually any computer with MPEG video format. MPEG offers a
high level of compression resulting in small files sizes with high quality. Since MPEG is a
platform-independent and non-commercial standard, it is emerging as a means for streaming
high-quality video on fast networks using special media servers. As with all things, MPEG-4’s
biggest strength may be its greatest weakness. Although the compression method is highly
efficient, it is also very complex. This means that it requires a great deal of processor time to
encode the file, i.e. alter it from a MPEG-2 format to MPEG-4. Although a run-of-the-mill PC
might take 6 to 12 hours to encode a feature length film, this not that great of a concern since it
places the processor burden on the distributor who can usually afford the newest equipment.
However, it also requires a great deal of processor power to view the video. The public, who do
not collectively have the latest and greatest computers, must absorb this burden. Although it is
too early in the development of MPEG-4 to tell how much processor time is needed, it is a
serious concern.
Real Audio – (RA)
The video component of the Progressive Networks Real Audio player mentioned previously.
This format uses compression techniques that reduce the frame rate of the video clip and
routines that remove unnecessary information within frames. The quality can vary greatly
depending on the amount of motion and detail in the original video. Again, this has the
advantage of being one of the more popular video and audio formats and your viewer will likely
have the player on their computer. The end user also has the option of playing the clip at a full
screen size on some computers. It allows for "streaming," meaning that the movie can be played
while it is being downloaded. The format uses heavy compression, and a special server is used
to "stream" the files to clients. The end result is a format that can be utilized over the Internet by
those with low bandwidth (modem) connections. The same free encoder used for audio may be
obtained from the Progressive Networks Web site.
Task 3
We did all the corrections that Dr.Alam asked us to do it through the website since it’s all
related to links problems.
Task 4
A link for both the power point presentation and
the final project are presented through the group
webpage
Final Project
http://www.eng.ysu.edu/~tataher/Final%20Projec
t.doc
Power point Presentation
http://www.eng.ysu.edu/~tataher/power.ppt