Developer's Digital Media Reference

New Tools, New Methods

Curtis Poole, Janette Bradley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136042737
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Designed for media professionals working across a broad range of formats, Developer's Digital Media Reference is an excellent reference guide for those keeping pace with this dynamic industry. As "convergence" between the World Wide Web, multimedia, and television production communities continues, there is an increased demand for professionals to familiarize themselves with the many new delivery contexts, including hybrid DVD (where digital video content and computer data live on the same disc), interactive TV, and streaming media.




Developer's Digital Media Reference covers essential technologies such as SVG (scalable vector graphics), SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, a markup language for creating animations on the web), MPEG-4 (compression standard for streaming audio/video), and Dynamic Web Applications. In addition to serving as a quick-look-up guide, this text is organized to explain today's major media: server-based architectures, disc-based architectures, distribution architectures, and merging/shared architectures. Each topic is discussed in terms of the technological background-evolution, current tools, and production tips and techniques.

Section I: Server-Based Architectures

Section I: Server-Based Architectures

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Server-based architectures encompass technologies that most of us associate with the World Wide Web. In this section of the book, we strive to redefine common notions of the Web and Internet to encompass new approaches to delivering content over the public network. Today, the conventional notion of a Website is quickly giving way to something entirely different. The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), for example, is being overtaken by the next-generation XML and XHTML standards. New forms of hardware all over the infrastructure — from faster server CPUs and data bus technology to broadband optical pipes — also promise to change our networks for the better.

What does this mean for content developers? Fundamentally, two developments are converging at the moment to reshape our concepts, development tools, and approaches: the maturing of dynamic database-driven Web content technologies and the growth of broadband deployment technologies. A third related development is the maturing of digital management and distribution technologies, which is covered in Section III.

From Static to Dynamic Content

The old idea of static Web pages of the late 1990s has given way to a more lively, interactive paradigm in the new millennium. Most of us still use the term “page,” even though much of our content has migrated into personalized, active, full-motion windows onto virtual worlds.

Specifically, the types of tools and technologies that are driving this evolution span both the server-side delivery mechanisms as well as the client-side elements. This complicates the development process somewhat from the early days of the Web hacker who could throw up a site in a day. To develop a thoroughly modern Web location today, you might have to work in a larger IT team that includes designers, multimedia authors, and various code and database experts. Content developers are working with a rich range of tools incorporating text, video, animation, HTML, XML, and so forth. Nearly all modern, dynamic Websites are hooked up to some form of database, which requires close cooperation between client and server content. In some cases, the old client-server paradigm is being challenged by new concepts of distributed information and delivery. These topics are covered in the chapters that follow.

Next-Generation Internet: News from the Frontlines

The advent of broadband is another cornerstone of the next wave of multimedia content. What exactly do we mean by broadband? At the moment most of us think of cable or DSL, which represent a major improvement over dial-up modems. But if you have a hard time understanding how postage-stamp Webcasting can ever seriously compete with television and film, you’ll be happy to know that our current broadband options do not represent our final destination on the information superhighway. For more than 160 universities as well as several large government institutions involved in the development of Internet2, broadband has a much broader meaning. Existing broadband solutions, for example, are 10 to 50 times faster than standard dial-up modems. Internet2 networks, already in existence, transfer data up to 85,000 times faster. This new system is known as Internet2, or I2.

History Repeats

In 1969 in the United States, helped by funding from the military, four computers were networked together in an effort to create a research network that could survive a military strike. Thirty years later we have the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Today, government and university research institutions are hoping to repeat that performance. You might recall former President Bill Clinton’s comments in his 1998 State of the Union address when he urged Congress to “enable all the world’s people to explore the far reaches of cyberspace.”

That speech launched the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Initiative, which is funded entirely by the U.S. government. The goal is to deliver 100 times the performance of the current Internet, on an end-to-end basis, to at least 100 interconnected federal agencies. No, Al Gore didn’t create the original Internet, but through NGI funding as well as activities of the National Science Foundation (NSF), it looks like the Clinton administration can take some credit for the creation of the second one.

Rapid Progress

More than a concept, Internet2 is actually an organization, a not-for-profit consortium led by universities that are developing and deploying advanced network applications and technology. The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) manages Internet2.

As with the first Internet, government and universities are first in line, but unlike “Internet1,” from the start NGI and I2 efforts involve industry leaders from the for-profit sector, such as MCI and Cisco Systems, will eventually contribute to the development of these services for the general public.

Work is progressing rapidly, and within one to two years we might begin to see deployments of major components of the system in the wider Internet. Some liken this period to the state of the first Internet in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. By this timetable we may be rapidly approaching another important watershed moment, like the period of the mid-1990’s when the first World Wide Web technologies appeared. Who knows what young Tim Berners-Lee might emerge from this experimental soup to rock our worlds once more.

Building a better Internet is no simple matter. First, of course, you need fatter pipes, but that’s not the end of it. Internet2 is looking to address some other aspects of the current system that show weakness, including security and services. But let’s start with the hardware.

The Pipes

vBNS

The building of next-generation pipes began in 1995 when construction started on the very-high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS), sponsored by the NSF and implemented by MCI WorldCom. The vBNS plays an important role in both NGI and Internet2 initiatives.

Abilene

Cisco Systems, Qwest, Nortel, and IBM, along with Internet2 universities, brought a second high-bandwidth backbone called Abilene (after the railhead in Abilene, Kansas, that opened the West) online in 1999. Abilene operates at 2.4 gigabits a second.

GigaPOPs

An important part of the Internet2 architecture is something called a GigaPOP. The term “GigaPOP” refers to the point of connection between local high-speed networks. Each GigaPOP is connected to other GigaPOPs through the backbone to form Internet2. Just as universities, states, and regions create GigaPOPs, commercial organizations will eventually create and link up using similar technologies and high-speed networking infrastructure.

The Services

IPv6

For Internet2, the IP in TCP/IP has a facelift. Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is the result of more than six years of work by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). IPv6 is designed to address the major shortcomings of IPv4, the current version at work in the broader Internet. IPv6 uses a different package scheme, the advantage of which is that it incorporates native multicasting, high reliability, and high capacity along with quality controls. IPv6 will allow applications requiring high bandwidth to coexist with each other simultaneously with little or no loss of data.

Because IPv6 includes native multicasting, users are able to send one content packet to many locations — instead of the current method of sending many packets to many locations. Real-time data can now be sent and manipulated in real time, which will allow, for example, television networks to bring their entire digital television offerings onto the Internet, to be delivered at full resolution with full frame accuracy.

QoS

Quality of service (QoS) has become a major issue for the Internet as well as for enterprise data networks due to the increasing importance of Internet service that must be better than best effort, as well as the integration of voice, video, and data. IPv6 includes a number of new QoS technologies designed to ensure more accurate delivery of data.

Routing

New routing schemes, too complex to describe here, are al...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Section I Server-Based Architectures
• Section II Disc-Based Architectures
• Section III Distribution Architectures
• Section IV Merged Architectures
• Appendix Additional Resources
• Bibliography and List of Internet Sources
• Index