I used to put my animations on the web in the form of AVI’s, the problem (aside from their size) was that people who wanted to view them had to download them in their entirety and save them to their disk. Lately however I’ve been using MPEG’s played off the RealPlayer, and I’m trying to understand the difference.
Please bear with the way I form these questions. I am a cartoonist, not a techie.
(1) Does the animaton run on a constant stream off the server?
I’m imagining the server as a box of Cap’n Crunch, when I play a file is it as though the Cap’n Crunch is poured into my left hand (which is my computers RAM) in a big stream, then my right hand (which is the RealPlayer) picks individual crunchberries out one by one.
Or, is the RealPlayer picking out the crunchberries one by one directly out of the box?
Or, does the whole box have to be dumped into my left hand (the RAM one) before the right hand can get at 'em?
(2) Does the “streaming” aspect esentially hijack the hard disk of the server it’s playing off of? Preventing it from serving anybody else who’s page is on that disk?
I’ve been stashing these animations on skunked Geocities and Angelfire sites (dummy index pages with the animations stashed among the files) and just hyperlinking from my real site. Is this esentially preventing the server from serving anybody else who’s page is on that disk?
Thanks
Inky