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Software

The era of on-demand entertainment has begun, having progressed hugely from the early days of video on demand via fiber-optics, which was all well and good if you happened to have a fiber optic cable into your house, but wasn't too handy (sic ) for those mobile moments (on the bus, train, etc...) when you could really do with some form of entertainment.

We are offering content in the formats we judge to be the best currently available. That is - whilst the on-demand industry is still developing rapidly, certain formats and with them the software needed to play them have grown into front runners for digital distribution. DivX® - widely thought of as the best video encoding solution currently available in terms of quality to file size ratio, now finds it way into many recently released hardware dvd players, as well as a new set of portable media players. The same is true of windows media format, whose digital rights management system is one of the most prevalent in use on the web, and has led to many content owners choosing the wmv /wma formats, alongside the prevalence of windows media player on so many machines.

The MP4 format is the latest incarnation from the motion picture experts group:

MPEG - Moving Picture Experts Group ISO standards for digital video and audio, designed for different uses and data rates.

           • MPEG-2 was a follow-on standard from the initial MPEG-1 format,
             supporting higher data rates, and thus higher quality.
             MPEG-2 is the standard used in DVD video players

           • MPEG-4 delivers video at comparable quality to MPEG1 at a much
             lower bit rate. MPEG-4 also supports a wide variety of elements that
             can be transmitted separately and combined to form the video
             frame, such as a talking head in one stream and the background
             in another

The format has the potential to allow for very small files at good quality resolution and as such has become one of the most popular formats for files to be played on PDA devices and mobile phones, and has been integrated into Apple®'s Quicktime® software, amongst others.

Mobile phones, or more specifically, 3G phones, also use the 3GPP and 3GPP2 formats for video files, we have included examples of both for download. Clearly the current roll out, in the UK specifically, of 3G services has still some way to go yet. Only Hutchinson-Whampoa's® 3 network, and more recently, Vodafone UK®, are, to date, offering the 384Kbps rate that is the bottom end of the proposed 3G capabilities but over time it is expected that the technology will be able to reach rates of up to 2MB/s, allowing for longer video files, with higher definition and subsequently larger file sizes.

Real Networks Real Player®© is widely used on PCs and also Nokia® phones as their default media player. While Real Player is capable of playing most video and audio formats, given the presence of the appropriate codecs, the Real media format is their preferred format so we have provided a real media version for download also, albeit primarily for use on a PC with broadband connection, but we will also be providing a version for mobile phones in the near future.

CODECS:

The following codecs must be installed on your system in order to view the relevant files:

DivX - DivX 5.2.1 codec available from www.divx.com/divx/download

MP4 / 3GP (h263) - both codecs will be installed on installation of either Quicktime 6.5® and/or Platform4 Player®

Windows Media files and Real Media files require only that you have an up to date version of the software installed.

BIT-RATES:

As with MP3 files, video files are encoded at a bit-rate measure in Kilobits per second. The appropriate bit-rate is determined by the bandwidth of the stream/device on which the file will be viewed. 3G phones currently allow for up to 384 Kbps but, to achieve faster download speeds we use a bit-rate of c.128Kbps to encode MP4 and 3GP files, likewise the MP3 snippets are encoded at 128Kbps (commonly accepted as CD-quality).

As 3G services improve so it will be possible to use faster bit-rates for even better quality. This is just the beginning...