Streaming video issue

sinaj · Post by **sinaj** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 6:47 pm

The website my hubby and I run shows streaming videos, and up to now we've only streamed .WMV files. Today I compressed one of my AMVs to stream and it plays, but it crashes both Firefox and IE after it's done playing.

It doesn't do this on anyone else's computers that I've talked to, so I'm guessing it's something to do with a plug in on my computer. Anybody have any ideas what it might be?

The video is an .avi / Xvid

A link is http://www.protoculturex.com/index.php? ... play&vid=6 in case anyone needs that to help me troubleshoot.

Thanks

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 7:19 pm

The video played back fine for me, and it didn't crash Opera.

However, it wouldn't let me start playing it until it had loaded completely.

And doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of streaming?

lordroba · Post by **lordroba** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 7:57 pm

checked it out, this is what i found....

Not wanting to wait for the thing to load(slow internet), I decided to check the things properties. What I noticed was that the file extension ended in .avi

From my experience, an online movie that has the actual file extension at the end can be watched and dowloaded onto the computer only after its done loading. (At this point it is being played from a temporary internet folder) While a file that ends in something such as whatever_urfile_is.asx, (which I assume to be common extension of streaming files) can't be downloaded onto the computer when it's done playing and the video is viewed by buffering pieces of it into the viewer's ram. (This is just my theory on how it works)

Anyways. I suggest you change the file so that the extension is a .streamingfileextension instead of the actual file extension.

I don't know if I made much sense, but I hope this gives some insight to the problem and I hope someone else can help with the rest. If not try looking here (a site found at the last second before posting this)

risk one · Post by **risk one** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 8:17 pm

lordroba wrote: Anyways. I suggest you change the file so that the extension is a .streamingfileextension instead of the actual file extension.

That's not really how it works (as far as I know). Streaming means that the person serving the video uses special software to send chunks of the video to person downloading it, and the person downloading it uses special software to watch these chunks, and then throw them away. Everything is usually encrypted so that you can't use some other software to watch the stream and save the video to your harddisk (god forbid people start distributing the scary movie trailers themselves). This needs to be done with special containers (like wmv, asx, mov or rm, but not avi) and special codecs (not xvid).

There are some codecs (like mpeg1) that you can play as you download them, (ie, the unfinished file is playable). I suppose this can be considered streaming too.

In short; changing the extension does not change the file.

Returning to the original question, what player do ff and ie use to play the file before they crash? (Didn't crash firefox/mpc 6.4 here btw).

sinaj · Post by **sinaj** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 9:01 pm

Thank you all for all the helpful info on this issue. That link is very helpful too by the way.

Returning to the original question, what player do ff and ie use to play the file before they crash?

Windows Media Player is used by the software we incorporated into our site, so that is what's used to play the video in both ff and ie. I've got the latest version on my system as well.

I'm fairly sure that if I can convert the .avi file to a .wmv file it will solve the issue since the other files we played on it were .wmv files and they worked fine. I know it will lose quality that way, but that's exceptable for what I'm doing and if people want to see a higher quality version they know to come here.

Any recommendations on how to convert an .avi to a .wmv? I couldn't seem to find a way to do it with my usual set up (Premiere/VirtualDub). Do I need Movie Maker? Or should I just try converting it to an mpeg and see if that works?

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 9:48 pm

sinaj wrote:Any recommendations on how to convert an .avi to a .wmv? I couldn't seem to find a way to do it with my usual set up (Premiere/VirtualDub). Do I need Movie Maker?

No, actually you don't. Get <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... n">Windows Media Encoder 9</a>.

(If for some reason that link doesn't work, it's #11 on <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Popu ... id=4">this list</a>.)

sinaj · Post by **sinaj** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 12:14 am

Thank you so much. I downloaded Encoder and after messing with the settings a bit I figured out how to convert the amv. It's working fine now (lessor quality, but I can live with that in this instance).

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 12:22 am

For best quality, you really should take your master copy and compress that to WMV instead of the XviD distribution copy you had up before. I remember when I was experimenting with WME9 that the WMV9 codec could compress nearly as well as XviD if you wanted it to.

Qyot27 · Post by **Qyot27** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 3:08 am

risk one wrote:Everything is usually encrypted so that you can't use some other software to watch the stream and save the video to your harddisk (god forbid people start distributing the scary movie trailers themselves). This needs to be done with special containers (like wmv, asx, mov or rm, but not avi) and special codecs (not xvid).

Not always. MOV files from the Quicktime Trailer site can usually be saved from your cache to another location on the computer by the Quicktime interface itself, there are ways of extracting the music videos from iTunes, and there are special programs to rip streaming media in the forms of WMV, ASF, and RM. About the only one that I think is still unable to be ripped is RTSP-served Quicktime media, but that's probably one of many things being worked on at the moment (mplayer might be able to do it, but when I tried it couldn't find one of the atoms it needed and therefore stopped the transfer before it even started).

MKV (and MP4) are both capable of streaming XviD-encoded video, but in the case of MKV I've never seen a site streaming it. MP4, maybe one or two, but those usually appear as solid download links. Of course, the problem with XviD in a streaming MP4 file is that (unless you use VLC or other like-minded players) MP4 is usually associated with Quicktime, which only supports Simple Profile, not Advanced SP, which most XviD encodes tend to be.