VIDEO-STREAMING S/W: Clipstream

This software takes away the pain of using a media player on a desktop to stream and play videos from the Internet. There are a number of different players available in the market, such as Microsoft’s Media Player, QuickTime, RealMedia and Winamp. All these options require their proprietary players to be installed on the system. The costs on the server side for these vary, Winamp being free. Clipstream tries to solve these worries by offering player-less streaming. It uses Java applets to stream videos to a user’s system. A 47 KB applet is downloaded on a user’s machine when he first logs on to the website. There are various options that can be controlled through the applet, such as opening HTML pages from a particular point in the video. You can stream either an encoded video or go live using a video capture card or a webcam. This however is offered through a separate package called Clipstream Live.

Encoding the video



The video to be streamed needs to be encoded in VCS format before it can be streamed. Major formats such as MPEG, AVI, MOV, WMV and ASF can be encoded to VCS. The encoder has a number of options to choose from, such as audio/video bit rate, frames per second, size and image quality. It can also export in a HTML page, which you can directly plug into your website. This can be edited like any ordinary HTML page to suit your requirements. The utility is quite handy and easy to use.

Playing the Video



You can upload the HTML file with the supporting files including VCS video on to the website and give a link to the HTML page. You can also use a code generation page on Clipstream’s website to generate Java applet code to be used in the HTML file. This helps you easily customize the video. You can use up to 20 secs of video for free. For a longer video, you need to take a license from the developers. This license is a hash of the IP addresses from which the video will be streamed. It also secures the video such that it cannot be played from any other site. You can stream the video by using either this license or the ASP model from the developers where you can host the videos on their website and they would charge you for the same. 

The HTML file can be opened in any Java-enabled browser and viewed without a hitch. While playing, the player calculates the user’s bandwidth and automatically chooses the quality of the video to be streamed. It can even work at bandwidths as low as 28 Kbps, but the quality will have to be compromised then.

Geetaj Channana