Synchronized Content - Page 3

Creating code that synchronizes slides along with media have been around since RealAudio 3. However, doing it easily is rather new. Several programs have been developed recently that make it much easier.

Windows Media On Demand Producer

This tool is free from Microsoft and can be downloaded at their site. It was developed in conjunction with Sonic Foundry and is a lightweight version of their Vegas Video production tool.

WMOP is used to create synchronized slides with on-demand video. Windows Media On-Demand Producer is a fairly robust tool that can do a lot more than just add URLs to the stream. It works with your video capture card, if you have one on your computer, to capture video directly into the program or you can load in WAV files or AVI video files as we are doing. The scripting you create, including the Commands, can be imported and exported between files making it easy to reuse. Many templates also ship with WMOP that allow you to encode at common speeds. If you don't like the templates you can also modify them.

Once you have an AVI file or other appropriate source file opened in WMOP, you can add Commands at time points throughout the program. The URL command is used and the Parameter is set to the name of the HTML page containing the various slides you want to display. When you are done entering URL commands choose the Publish action under the File menu. This will give you a choice of several prepared Templates. To create a slide show choose the (URL Flip) Slide Show selection and the program will create the slide show for you.

WMOP is a great free tool, but it is limited in the design and layout of the slide show. To create a more robust slide show you will need to go with a third party tool.

SofTV Products

I was recently introduced to these tool for creating both on- demand and live synchronized presentations on the Web without additional plugins. On-demand production of synchronized content is difficult, but similar live production is much harder.

Softv Author

Softv Author allows you to do visual layout of the video and graphics on the page, including drag and drop resizing of the elements of the page.

Once the pages are visually laid out they can be published to a Web site by pressing a single publish button. The dynamic HTML which is used to create the pages is written by the program and is compatible with both Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape 4 as well as Real Media and Windows Media.

Softv PresenterLive

This tool is Softv's most interesting. It allows you to produce live webcasts with synchronized slides. This may sound simple, but in reality injecting page turns commands into the Windows Media Encoder software is very difficult.

Use the Author software to layout the Web page and create the template. Then open the PowerPoint presentation into PresenterLive. The slides will be converted from PowerPoint to JPG files and sent to the end users browser to be precached. Another program called LiveSync is used by the producer to control slide changes. This program links to yet another program — TriggerMaker — which actually talks to the Windows Media Encoder and injects the page turn commands into the video stream.

At the client end, the triggers are received by a small Java program running in the Web page. This Java program controls the page turns on the client end.

SofTV has produced a suite of programs that are on the leading edge of technology. They allow you to replicate the functionality that until now would have taken an expensive service provider to produce.

These programs are available at Softv.net.

Conclusion

Windows Media reaches it's full potential when it is combined with other elements on the Web page to produce advanced video applications. As bandwidth increases on the Web you will start to see better video applications aimed at sports, weather and news broadcasts. Yahoo FinanceVision is a good example of a first attempt at this new medium.

Over time, with the creation of new tools such as SofTV, these capabilities will trickle down into the hands of corporate trainers and individual users. That's when things will start getting interesting.

The Basics - Page 2
Windows Media: JavaScript Buttons