I've been working for the last two weeks on building a "playerless" player for 
the QCShow talks that we've been recording for the last several years.

The current QCShow player is a Windows-only standalone application. In a 
platform-agnostic world, that's bad enough, but perhaps even worse, it 
requires that you download the player in order to watch the talks. A surprising 
number of people do do that, but I strongly suspect that a much larger 
percentage don't for two reasons: 

One is that it requires some effort to download and install anything, and inertia 
is a very powerful motivator not to do anything that looks like work. And of 
course, some people just don't feel technically comfortable doing anything that 
modifies their machine.

But the second, more powerful reason is that we now live in the age of 
cooties, and no one wants to download anything strange or new any more.

In fact, Vista won't even let QCShow programs run. Although the QCShow 
Player is nothing more than a modified browser, because Vista has never heard 
of it before, it won't let it play without you changing Vista's default security 
settings, and no ordinary user is going to do that.

Thus to greatly enhance the penetration of the talks, I decided to rewrite the 
player in Javascript within the standard browsers. The advantages of doing 
this are that the player will now be platform-independent, require no external 
software other than a QuickTime or RealPlayer plug-in in the browser (which 
most people will already have), it will use any of the standard browsers (IE, 
Safari or Firefox) and will run on either Windows, Mac or Linux.

If you have the time, would you mind looking at this test version and see what 
you think:

   http://aics-research.com/testmovie.html

This one talk was assembled by hand as a prototype, but as soon as I finalize 
the design I can write the code to automatically assemble the webpages. 
We've kept all of the details for all of the previously recorded talks are here, 
thus once the new assembly code is written, it will only require running the 
previously recorded talks through the new authoring code to have all of the 
talks converted into this format.

Everything on the screen is clickable. If you click the main picture, you 
start/stop the audio. If you click the thumbnail images at the bottom of the 
page, you go to that particular point in the narration (provided that you've 
given it long enough to download to that point). And of course, if you click on 
the QuickTime or Realplayer controller controls, they'll do what you ask.

Which controller (QT or RP) is used is determined by the kind of browser you're 
using. QuickTime is our preference, but it won't work with Firefox's Javascript, 
so in that case, we auto-switch you to Realplayer.

I would very much appreciate hearing any comments you might have. The 
criteria for this design are: (i) that it be essentially instantaneously 
launchable, (ii) that it provide a very low load on the browser, (iii) that it be 
very low bandwidth (this talk runs 24 minutes, but requires only 7 MB of 
storage, thus averaging a 40 kbps download rate), (iv) that it have high-
quality audio, and (v) most especially, have a large, high-quality image display. 
This last requirement is especially important for scientific and technical 
lectures.

Wirt Atmar

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *