streaming excludes your audience
May. 28th, 2008 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eIf you are ever in a position to decide whether to make audio and/or video available on the net, please do what you can to present it to your audience as downloadable files, not streaming-only. Some formats, like mp3, and I believe ogg, can be downloaded or streamed at the discretion of the listener. Streaming-only formats like the absurdly named "Real" media files or the various Microsoft streaming formats shut out many potential listeners.
Like most people, I am on dial-up internet. Streaming-only formats are impossible to listen to when they play like "The qu...............ick br...............own f............ox j..............ump...............s..." In theory they are supposed to buffer properly so that they can play continuously, but in practice they almost never do. The broken, pause-ridden nature of such programs means it can take an hours to listen to a short piece because of all the wasted time.
Some specialised programs exist that allow the user to defeat streaming by accumulating it to a file, but the difficulties of streaming mean that this sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't, and if it doesn't you have to begin grabbing the file from the beginning all over again whereas downloadable files let you skip over the bit that did download and continue from where it prematurely quit. But even if you do have a program that collects a stream into a single file, the makers of streaming formats are specifically opposed to this and use various underhand techniques to battle it, such as changing their formats from time to time, and mounting legal suits against creators of such programs.
Streaming formats reduce the options for audiences. Last night I tried to stream 13 talks to files on my computer because their pauses and gaps rendered the content impossible to listen to. Only 2 succeeded. All the rest stopped between several minutes and an hour into the program. If I want to hear these I must attempt again from the beginning. What an absurd waste of my time, the bandwidth of the server, and the bandwidth of everybody between.
It is a waste in another way. I listen to many of the audio files on my computer more than once. If the only way to hear a program repeatedly is to re-connect then that loads down servers and increases their costs. Much better to make the file downloadable and allow the end-user listen to it locally as many times as they wish. This has another nice flow-on effect. People like to share. This means they will pass interesting material on to others, who will may then become audience members for the site. Streaming-only files don't have that advantage. They make it harder instead of easier.
One of the worst aspects of streaming-only formats is that from a historical perspective it forces much of our culture to be ephemeral, so that it leaves little behind for historians to study. This also applies to locked ebooks. What will we leave for future generations if we have forced all our culture to evaporate behind us. We may become the first generation to leave our children an impoverished culture, with a blank gap where our explosive culture grew fastest. What will YouTube, all the RealMedia sites, all the locked ebooks, and register-only sites and programs leave for the future? Nothing except vague recollections.
Like most people, I am on dial-up internet. Streaming-only formats are impossible to listen to when they play like "The qu...............ick br...............own f............ox j..............ump...............s..." In theory they are supposed to buffer properly so that they can play continuously, but in practice they almost never do. The broken, pause-ridden nature of such programs means it can take an hours to listen to a short piece because of all the wasted time.
Some specialised programs exist that allow the user to defeat streaming by accumulating it to a file, but the difficulties of streaming mean that this sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't, and if it doesn't you have to begin grabbing the file from the beginning all over again whereas downloadable files let you skip over the bit that did download and continue from where it prematurely quit. But even if you do have a program that collects a stream into a single file, the makers of streaming formats are specifically opposed to this and use various underhand techniques to battle it, such as changing their formats from time to time, and mounting legal suits against creators of such programs.
Streaming formats reduce the options for audiences. Last night I tried to stream 13 talks to files on my computer because their pauses and gaps rendered the content impossible to listen to. Only 2 succeeded. All the rest stopped between several minutes and an hour into the program. If I want to hear these I must attempt again from the beginning. What an absurd waste of my time, the bandwidth of the server, and the bandwidth of everybody between.
It is a waste in another way. I listen to many of the audio files on my computer more than once. If the only way to hear a program repeatedly is to re-connect then that loads down servers and increases their costs. Much better to make the file downloadable and allow the end-user listen to it locally as many times as they wish. This has another nice flow-on effect. People like to share. This means they will pass interesting material on to others, who will may then become audience members for the site. Streaming-only files don't have that advantage. They make it harder instead of easier.
One of the worst aspects of streaming-only formats is that from a historical perspective it forces much of our culture to be ephemeral, so that it leaves little behind for historians to study. This also applies to locked ebooks. What will we leave for future generations if we have forced all our culture to evaporate behind us. We may become the first generation to leave our children an impoverished culture, with a blank gap where our explosive culture grew fastest. What will YouTube, all the RealMedia sites, all the locked ebooks, and register-only sites and programs leave for the future? Nothing except vague recollections.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-05-28 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-28 10:15 am (UTC)mplayer "rtsp://forum.wgbh.org/forum/3317-2006_12_14_audio.rm" -dumpstream -dumpfile "Richard Florida - Rise of the Creative Class_2006-12-14.rm"
Sometimes it works, but often not. It is no fault of mplayer, but of the "weather conditions" on the net. If the net is congested then it seems to fail at some random point. Are you on dial-up or broadband?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-28 11:17 am (UTC)Another thing you should probably try is to -cache X for various values of X.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-28 10:35 pm (UTC)I guess those files will have to wait till I get up to my parents' place and I can use their broadband connection.
Oh well.... no worries.
By the way, it is well worth listening to the file I mentioned above. Richard Florida is an amazing guy who maps out a very cool future for those who want to hear. It points out that the richest cities are those that embrace diversity in both culture and sexuality. The way he explains it makes a lot of sense. These days riches spring from the fertile minds of the creative classes, and those people are attracted to interesting and happy places. They don't look for tax breaks or sports stadiums; they want their, and their children's minds, to be nourished.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 12:58 am (UTC)http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/ITC.ETech-ArthurBenjamin-2007.03.26.mp3
The explanatory page is at
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3501.html
This guy is amazing! His explanations of his techniques are even more cool than his feats. You have gotta hear it.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-28 05:10 pm (UTC)I'm sure you've used Audacity. A total pain in the ass, but it lets you record streams, make nice cuts, splices, and fades including crossfades, which is even more pain-in-the-assish, as I'm pretty sure you know.
Let's be pals to our users. Even the avatars of "don't be evil", Google, don't let you doenload some streams. I'm thinking of the "Beyond Belief" lectures.
I've been giving some otherwise very nice people hell about handicapped-hostile sites and blogs (can you say blogger/Blogspot?)
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 12:56 am (UTC)I'll try capturing the audio via Audacity, but I doubt I'll have any more luck playing the streaming audio than I did capturing the stream directly.
I looked up "Beyond Belief" and found numerous links. What lectures were you thinking of? Most interesting to me is that I found reference to a talk on the Science Network by one of my heroes (heroines?) Carolyn Porco who is in charge of the Cassini spaceship imaging team.
I also found Beyond Belief Media Company which has a DVD out of a documentary called "The God Who Wasn't There". It looks really neat.
Re: Beyond belef
Date: 2008-05-29 06:47 pm (UTC)http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief/watch/
And
http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief2/
Lack-of-god bless you for mentioning The God Who Wasn't There on DVD, which I didn't even know existed. I'll check the library, and hope asking won't get me arrested. This is still the Corporate States of Jesusland.
Re: Beyond belef
Date: 2008-05-29 11:44 pm (UTC)If you have problems getting "The God Who Wasn't There" it can be bought at the site.
Audacity
Date: 2008-05-29 07:04 pm (UTC)Wrt the plugins other apps install, they're probably good! There's one that lets you simulate the hiss and pop of an LP record. That one doesn't work on the PC, so once again I envy you for having Linux.
But the fade in and out rule! "select here to end" is good, but there should be more thins like it and it shouldn't involve as many submenus. But given that suckage, it's bearable.
Also, recording mono tracks and merging them into stereo and extracting mono tracks from stereo are either broken or a serious pain. Once again, having Linux may save you.
Re: Audacity
Date: 2008-05-29 11:54 pm (UTC)Yes. Fade in and fade out are two of my most used functions.
Heheheheh :) Converting mono<-->stereo is absurdly difficult and not at all intuitive in Audacity. I've done it a number of times and have to re-learn on each occasion. Also converting sample rate is much harder than it should be. My old Amiga could do any of those easily and efficiently with a single click, even anti-aliasing the sound as it went. This was way back before the 90s!!!