Goleta DeskTop Publishing User Group
Meeting Information

Tuesday July 2 -- Video on the Web
presented by Jeremy Rex, Sorenson Media

A picture may be worth a thousand words but sometimes even that's not enough, and only a video will serve your needs. There is a big problem though -- video file sizes are huge compared to those for pictures. If you thought it was World Wide Wait while waiting for a picture to download, you can see you need to pull some tricks to make the download time of a video tolerable.

Just as we have ways (like JPEG) of compressing pictures to make them download more quickly, there are various "codecs" (coder-decoder) for video which really slim them down. Fortunately the QuickTime player that's installed on most personal computers supports several codecs, including one from Sorenson Media.

Jeremy Rex, who works for Sorenson, will show us how to prepare a short video for the web using Sorenson Squeeze. The resulting video downloads relatively quickly and can be viewed in the standard QuickTime player.

Jeremy will also show us Sorenson Vcast, which lets you do streaming video on the Web. It provides a simple, affordable, end-to-end solution for Webcasting live or pre-recorded video. Vcast uploads your video content to CDN servers worldwide so that it is delivered from the servers closest to the end user. This is in contrast to delivering the video from your own server, which would require the information traverse a much larger portion of the web, taking longer and losing quality along the way. Thus with Vcast your end users see better quality and more responsive video.

You can get more information about Sorenson Media's products at their web site: www.sorenson.com

Please send email to gdtpug@troutcom.com with suggestions for topics you are interested in seeing covered. Or even better, volunteer to give a presentation!

The Goleta DeskTop Publishing Users Group is a SIG (Special Interest Group) of the Santa Barbara PC Users Group. We are not platform specific: some members have PCs, some have Macs, some have both. Linux and other systems are sprinkled in as well for good measure. We focus on the issues of publishing in all forms, be it on paper, web, CD-ROM, or some other medium.