DV for Teachers

This Microsoft article compares serving Windows Media via a web server and a streaming server. Both will work, but without the Windows Media Services streaming server,
the client machine must download the entire file before it can begin
playing. This means that for clips longer than a few seconds,
especially on non-broadband clients, WMV files can take a while to get
going. The MS proprietary streaming server offers more rights
management, streaming through firewalls, and many other features
desirable for large organizations with high demand and the personnel to
manage the infrastructure. Yet I’m certain most schools won’t or can’t
try to deal with that.



There’s another issue here, as well: the WMV files produced by Windows
Movie Maker are either in DV-AVI format or Windows Media 9 format.
DV-AVI is a native DV format, the file type iMovie used for example,
and exactly what’s on MiniDV tape. It’s an open standard with a 3.5 MB
per second data rate, which is way too large for the web without further compression. If the file needs more work at that point,

and you need to work with an existing system in your school or lab, it makes more sense to purchase Discreet’s Cleaner, add a FireWire card if necessary, and compress to an easier-to-stream format (see below).



WMV offers us no advantage over the procedure we use now. Most of the
time, we capture on a Mac G4, compress with Cleaner to WMV, Real, or QT
as needed.If they want video in PowerPoint, I compress to MPEG-1 which
looks nice and scales very well onscreen and plays in a wide variety of
players. Windows Media 9 format plays only on Windows XP systems, according to this page. If your audience is on a Mac or hasn’t all moved to XP, then they can’t see it.



QuickTime’s fast start or – “progressive download” – allows the first part of a clip to start playing while the rest
downloads in the background, and it works on a regular web server. If
we need to do true streaming, we have the QuickTime Streaming Server on
a Mac OS X server, but it’s available as Darwin Streaming Server for Windows, Linux, and Solaris… for free. Apple also offers a free DV capture tool called HackTV
for Windows. [Correction: HackTV for Windows isn’t working for me yet on my test machine.]  With that and the $30 QuickTime Pro, you can capture, do
basic editing, and export to a fast-start format that will play in
QuickTime on Mac or Windows. After checking all this out, I’ll now
offer folks the choice of WMV9 files, easily captured and basically
edited, only if they need a quick clip in PowerPoint for Windows here
on campus. Otherwise, for web or any other use, I’ll suggest QuickTime
all the way.
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