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By: Michael Bednarek
The Internet, as wonderful as it is, suffers from very low transmission speeds. We've all experienced them waiting for some graphics-heavy site to appear or for a demo of the latest game to download. You can imagine, then, how difficult it is to implement multimedia on the World Wide Web. A three minute long movie trailer takes over twenty minutes to download on most people's modems.
A very popular solution to this problem has been the use of streaming media - multimedia files which play as they download, thus providing instant gratification and a continuous experience at the expense of a little quality. RealAudio and RealVideo are the two most popular standards for streaming media on the web at the moment. Not only do they compress immensely large media files into tiny ones, they allow you to watch or listen to live events. Want to broadcast your radio show to the masses? No problem - and your live TV news programme can even come and join the fun as well!
RealPublisher comes from RealNetworks, the creator of these file formats. It allows you to transform most normal media files into RealMedia files, ready for download from the web. It also lets you broadcast live content to the Web, in conjunction with RealServer software. In this review I'll take a look at the various capabilities of the program and whether it's worth your money.
RealPublisher comes bundled with a user manual about 200 pages in length, which actually comprises of a Getting Started guide and the longer Content Creation Guide. The former is a step by step basic introduction to the program and how to use it. The latter is a more detailed explanation of the program's abilities and also a guide on authoring RealMedia files in general, covering topics which aren't even possible in RealPublisher (but more about that later).
The Getting Started guide really is simple to follow and even gives you step by step instructions for the program's installation, which went very smoothly. It also provides foolproof guidance for all the other major features of the program. It helps that RealPublisher's user interface is very simple. You can choose to use it in Wizard Mode, where you're led along the way like a baby, or Advanced mode, where you have more control over the various options.
Above: RealPublisher's one screen interface is very easy to use.
When you start up the program for the first time, it throws up the Wizard mode and offers you a choice of three initial options - record your RM clip from another media file, record it straight from a media device, or create a live broadcast.
In many cases, you will already have a WAV file or an AVI movie which you would like to distribute on the Web. In this case, you'd choose the first option. RealPublisher accepts any audio (AU), waveform (WAV), Video for Windows (AVI) and QuickTime for Windows (MOV) files, though it recommends that you use uncompressed files wherever possible. This means that you need a lot of free disk space, but that's expected for video editing.
After you've chosen the file that you wish to convert, you're asked for several bits of information relating to your RM clip. Firstly the author, title and copyright information, and secondly what the main audience will be (in other words, for which modem speed it should be optimised). You're also asked for the type of audio in the clip, and the desired video quality if applicable. If you use Advanced mode instead, you get to control things like frame rate and separate audio and video speeds, and you can pinpoint more exactly which kind of video it is (e.g. two heads talking, high action etc.).
Above: The Recording Wizard asks which video quality you would like.
After one or two more easy steps, your video or audio clip starts encoding. When the process is finished, you're left with your very own RealMedia file. The results are quite spectacular as far as compression goes; my 3.25Mb test video clip was reduced to around 74Kb. The average frame rate was 6fps, and the image quality was blurry, but when you're getting it fed to you over the net at 28.8kbps, what does it matter?
RealPublisher also lets you record from a live device straight into a media file. For audio, this means speaking into a microphone, and video can come from any suitable device which can be connected to your PC through an external port or a video capture card - for example a VCR, camcorder, or even a TV tuner.
If you have a RealServer, you can take this one stage further and do a live broadcast. You simply specify the clip's details in the usual way, where the data will come from, the details of the RealServer, and the location of the file where the broadcast will be stored. This is ideal for broadcasting live radio or television programmes over the Internet and is used on many TV network and radio station web sites.
RealPublisher's services don't stop there. Once you've created your clip, you'll want to publish it on the Web. RealPublisher will automatically create a basic HTML page for you (using another wizard) containing either a link to an automatically generated metafile (necessary for streaming from a web server) or an embedded version of the RealPlayer software. It can upload these files to the desired location on your server with information you give it, so that you don't have to lift a finger. It can even e-mail your clip to someone else!
As useful as it is, RealPublisher could have been better. If you read through the Content Creation Guide, you'll see that it mentions many features of RM clips that cannot be accessed or altered through RealPublisher. As a result, they have to be done manually, which can be fiddly, and is a sharp contrast from the Wizard-littered environment of RealPublisher.
One example are RM image maps. They work just like image maps in HTML - in other words, areas of the video clip become "live" and do something when the user clicks on them. With RealMedia, image map files are initially text files, using a similar sort of syntax as the HTML image map tags. One important difference is that of course a video changes over time, and so map definitions must also have start and end times.
Once you've written your text file, you convert it into an RM file using an included utility, and then merge this file with the RM clip it applies to. This involves typing in a long command into the command line. The whole process could be greatly simplified with RealPublisher's friendly interface - pause the clip at the appropriate moment, draw hotspot areas with two or three simple tools, select how long each should last for and what they should do, and finally compile and merge the files automatically.
Another feature which could have benefited from this treatment is Synchronized Multimedia. This is the ability of RM clips to manipulate HTML pages at certain points in their running times - for example as an interactive multimedia slideshow. To create one you need to write a file in a text editor consisting of start and end times, URLs, etc. You then use another included utility to convert this file into an RM-readable metafile.
Again, why can't you pause the RM clip in RealPublisher, select the activities you would like to happen at that point, and then have a metafile automatically be created at the end?
I've taken you through my likes and dislikes of this program. The question is - should you buy it? If you're running a small site, such as a personal one, and would just like to enrich it with a bit of RealAudio, then don't bother - there are quite a few shareware programs out there which will produce it for you (albeit without the template system that RealPublisher uses).
However, if you want professional standard RealAudio or RealVideo, or you need to broadcast it live, then I would recommend RealPublisher to you. It's very simple to use and not too expensive. It would have been nice to have a few more features built in - perhaps for the next version, guys?
| Program Information | ||
|---|---|---|
| Price | US$79.98 | Minimum Requirements |
| Publisher | RealNetworks |
|
| A worthwhile buy if you want to include advanced RealMedia on your site, but not worth it for simple Real Audio clips. | ||
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If you think RealPublisher might be the product for you, you can purchase the full version online from Beyond.com (US only). Just click on the icon to your left to jump to the order page, and then wait for the program to arrive by mail order. |