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The IATEFL Computer SIG Virtual Pre-Conference Event Bios Tutor Groups |
1a: Listening to/watching pre-recorded materialFirst of all, let's clarify what "one-directional audio/video" means. One-directional audio or video is the Internet equivalent of listening to the radio/cassette/CD or watching the TV/video. You receive sound and/or images, but don't interact with anyone. Unless of course you shout at the contestants you're listening to or watching - but that can hardly be called "interactive" ;-) The first thing we'll do is listen to and/or watch some recordings. At the most basic level, there are two ways of doing this- here's the first method: you download the recording onto your computer, then play it back from there. Let's try that. Please click on link number 1 below this paragraph, and save the file to disk, remembering where you've saved it. Once you've saved it, find it again on your computer and play it by double-clicking it (unless you change the name it'll be called welcome.wav) Once you've downloaded, saved and listened to that, let's move on: You probably noticed that for such a short recording (10 seconds or thereabouts) you had to wait a relatively long time for it to download onto your computer. Imagine how long a 5-minute recording would take to download! Of course, there are some things you can do to make the download a bit faster - for example, you can save it in a compressed format, which means it'll be a smaller file, but also lose some quality. To listen to the same clip as before but compressed, do the same to file 2 below as you did to file 1 (unless you change the name it'll be called welcome2.wav) Listen to both files 1 and 2, and you'll notice the difference in quality. For voice only the second file is probably fine - it's still quite clear - but if you start using background music and other fancy things it's not quite as desirable anymore. Because downloading, saving a file and then listening to it can be tedious, a new method was developed, called "streaming". What this basically does is allow you to start listening to or watching the clip almost immediately, directly from the website, without the need to download the whole file first. Technical info: what it actually does is download the first part of the clip onto a temporary part of your hard drive, then start playing that back. While that's being played back it downloads the next part of the clip, and so on. So, after the initial downloading of the first part of the clip ("buffering"), you can listen to the clip straight away. Similar to the radio and TV, there's now a wealth of streamed material out there. Some of it is pre-produced and you can watch it again and again whenever you want to, while some of it is live and can only be viewed as it's happening. To listen to or watch pre-produced material or live shows you'll need a program to play it back. Unfortunately there are a number of formats - in the same way that there used to be a battle between VHS, BetaMax and whatever other formats there were, there are a number of formats available for Internet audio and video. If you want to watch a particular clip, you need to know which format the clip is in, and then need to make sure you have the correct player. At the moment the most popular formats for streamed material are probably Real and Windows Media. To play back clips in Real format you need the RealPlayer, to play back clips in Windows Media you need the Windows Media Player. Both are available free. We'll be focusing on the RealPlayer for now. Depending on how old your computer is, which browser you're using etc. you may already have everything you need. Let's try it out. Click on the link below, which is a link to a RealVideo file, and see what happens! Click here to watch the RealPlayer file If nothing happens, you'll need to download and install the RealPlayer. You can do that from http://www.real.com - remember that there's a free player which is fine. They'll try very hard to lead you to the paid-for version which isn't strictly necessary, but does yield better audio and video quality; if they try to take money off you straight away, though, keep looking for the free one if you don't want to pay. Once you've downloaded and installed the player, click the link above again and watch the video. You should also be able to hear sound - make sure your speakers/headset are plugged in and the volume is turned up. So - you've now successfully downloaded and listened to a sound file, as well as watched a streaming RealVideo file. Now's a good time to play around with it a bit - try going to http://www.broadcast.com for example to listen to or watch a huge variety of clips. Also, most news websites such as http://www.cnn.com and http://www.itn.co.uk have clips of some of their programs on their sites. And that's the end of part 1a! To see how much you remember from what we've covered, click here to take a short quiz, or click here to go on to the next part - Producing your own material . |
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