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Making the Lectures
Universally Available
The QCShow protocol was designed to transmit technical lectures at HDTV and FM image and sound quality anywere in the world at very low bandwidths. Unfortunately, the QCShow Player is currently available only for Windows.
In order to extend the reach of the recorded lectures, we've increased the capabilities of the QCShow Authoring tool to now also generate SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) formatted lectures as well.
Although not as capable as QCShow, SMIL-formatted lectures can be played on both the Mac and Linux platforms, using the QuickTime and Real Players (only Real is available on Linux).
SMIL Player Behavior
The QuickTime and Real Players are very similar in their behaviors, suggesting that they both were built from the same contributed code. However, there are a few differences, with Real being the better player.
- Image Quality: QCShow images are transmitted at very high quality at 800 x 600 pixels, and should be viewed at that size, if at all possible. Neither QuickTime nor Real does a good job at either shrinking or expanding their images. When the lectures are played in an embedded player, 800 x 600 is the size at which the images will be automatically presented.
If you right-click (command-click on a Mac) on the image area, you are offered the possibility of playing the lecture in Real Player as a standalone application. You may find this option valuable as the standalone Real Player provides you will additional controls you don't have in the embedded player, such as full-screen mode.
If your screen resolution is set to 800 x 600, you will want to use the full-screen option of Real Player. If your screen resolution is set larger, you may still want to put the player into "theater mode," but then set the display to 1X, original or actual size, depending on your version of the player.
- Caching: Neither Real nor QuickTime cache downloaded lectures, nor do they allow you to save them locally, thus each time you view the lecture, it must be downloaded again from its server. This feature also requires that you be connected to the internet. Local play is not possible.
- Bookmarking: Neither Real nor QuickTime bookmark your quit location if you stop watching a lecture before you finish with it. If you quit the player and come back to the same lecture later, you must download it again from the beginning, thus it's far better to put the player in pause and leave it running if you must leave the lecture for a while.
- Low-bandwidth Delivery: The SMIL protocol does not transmit the size of the various sound and image components in advance, thus neither player has any method to gauge how much material must be downloaded before it can be certain to play in an uninterrupted manner. If you encounter frequent black screens or interrupted sound seqments due to a low-bandwidth connection, the best thing to do is to press the pause button and wait five minutes before resuming in order to allow the incoming material to buffer up in the player.
- High-speed search: Neither the Real nor QuickTime player has high-speed search or cuing capabilities. They simply play from beginning to end. However, the standalone Real Player does have a time slider bar which does allow a primitive form of cuing.
Using SMIL is a stop-gap measure. The QCShow Authoring tool is currently being rewritten again so as to produce QuickTime movies. QuickTime movies are capable of being viewed in both Real and QuickTime players, and when presented in this format, many of the deficiencies noted above disappear.
We expect to have these lectures available in QuickTime by the beginning of 2007, for both presentations on computers as well as optimized for iPods.
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These Lectures are Sponsored by
AICS Research, Inc.
You can easily create lectures of equal quality yourself.
The internet has obvious promise for the dissemination of instructional material over very large distances and into remote corners of the world. To that end, AICS Research has created two products, QCShow, a freely-downloadable player, and QCShow Author, an inexpensive content authoring tool that produces FM-quality sound and full-screen HDTV-quality slideshows at very low bandwidths.
As an adjunct to that development process, for the past 30 months AICS Research has been recording the highest quality conferences in cosmology, astronomy, planetology, geology, astrobiology, ecology, behavior and evolutionary biology so that these presentations may be viewed by anyone anywhere in the world.
The QCShow Player was designed for both individual viewer and for the classroom, so that you may "team teach" with the lectures. Indeed, you may run the lecture through a classroom projector and your room's sound system and very closely recreate the lecture as it was first presented live, but now with the capacity to instantly pause the speaker and interpose your own commentary wherever you wish.
QCShow Author was similiarly designed to be as simple a mechanism as possible, allowing a single lecturer to create productions equal to the very best of educational television, but very quickly, and at astoundingly low costs.
Copyright Notice: AICS Research asserts no copyright over any of the lectures presented in this series. Whatever copyrights exist, they reside with the original authors. You have been given permission to save these lectures on your local machines if you wish, so long as they are not modified in any manner.
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