I wanted to try and see if my department could move messaging out to students in a form that was familiar to them. The advent of YouTube and other video sites has defined a sort of “standard” as to how video is now displayed on the web in the form of streaming or progressively downloaded flash video. The advantages of encoding and streaming or progressively downloading a video in this format is that it is unobtrusive to the user. Flash is as close to a web standard as you can get, similar to other proprietary formats such as Adobe’s .PDF format for documents. Files presented in this format are very small but maintain enough clarity as can be expected from a normal web site so branding can still be carried over.
Here is my first attempt. This was a 30mb avi file encoded and compressed down to about 1kb:
http://www.austincc.edu/eterry/test/flashtest.php
Here is the same video encoded at a higher setting. The file is now at about 3mb:
http://www.austincc.edu/eterry/test/flashtest2.php
Hopefully when you clicked the links you were able too see the videos right inside of your web browser, no need to open RealPlayer or Windows Media Player.
Hopefully Ill be able to use this to make our website a little more engaging and informative.
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