Creating Media and Encoding

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Creating Media

Media is aggregated in the following manner. There may be other ways of finding media files.

• Existing media files floating on the web, lot of these files should be coming into your mail inbox. Always check the terms of usage of these kind of files
• Web Cam Capture: You can capture the media files using your web cam however the quality of the media will depend on the how low/high end your web cam is
• Video Cameras: These could be normal cam coders or mobile cameras
• PC screen capture: A computer screen is captured here using screen capture tools like Eat screen recorder. Windows Media Encoder is free tool which can be used for recording. If you have a proper headphone with mike you can record voice along this PC screen

Media Mafia

Now that we have the media we will need to encode it to media server compatible format. The formats which are most popular are H262, H263 and H264. H264 is also called MPEG 4 AVC. Most of the media servers take H264 format standard as the base and create their own proprietary codec’s.

• Real Media Server uses its proprietary codec called RM(Real Media), RV(Real Video) and (RA)Real Audio based on H264 standard and these media files can be played only by Real Player
• Windows Media Server uses its proprietary WMV(Windows Media Video). These media files can be played by Windows media player

Most of the Media streaming done by popular streaming servers including Apple’s Darwin are closely clubbed to their encoders and players and are not interoperable and portable. This proprietary Mafia is a single biggest paint point in portable streaming media development. There are some open source media players which have tried to give support for all these formats but have been largely unsuccessful.

Media Encoding

Every media server comes with encoding software which converts the non-stream able format to H264 based streaming format.

• Real Media Server can play media encoded by Real Producer tool as RM
• Windows Media Server can play media encoded by Windows Media Encoder tool as WMV

It is recommended that the files fed to these encoders are in uncompressed formats like uncompressed AVI etc for better results. Some files may not be compatible for encoding by Media Servers Encoders. In this case sanitization of the files needs to be done using general encoders like FFMEG and the resultant sanitized file should be fed to the Media Server Encoder. FFMPEG is an open source encoder tool which is widely used across the media firms.

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