• Working within Copyright
• Best Practice

When you are ready to encode your move to put it on the internet, your going to want to download the Windows Media encoder. The application is free for registered Windows users.

If you are a Mac user the Windows Media encoding software is not available for you. However there are other options you can look into.

Streaming depends on the bandwidth, or the internet connection that your students have. The better the connection, the better the video will stream. The worse the connection the greater the chance that they will not be able to view your video. Getting an idea of how your students will view your video content is a good idea before encoding your video for the internet.

A good bench mark for encoding streaming video is not to place the "throughput" settings over 340Kbsp for audiences with broadband (Cable or DSL) connections. This allows for a higher quality persentation while keeping the required bandwidth to view the file at a resonable level. Setting the encoding level any higher might prevent all students from viewing your video file.

The general belief when it comes to encoding video for the internet is that the viewer can handle missing some seconds of video, but if the audio is interupted it becomes more difficult to follow along. (How many times have you "watched television" by listening to the TV while doing something else at the same time?) Don't skimp on the audio encoding setting in your video.

It is all too easy to sit in the office encode and upload a video to the Windows streaming server, and test it to see if it plays. But it might not play for anyone off campus. And if you have students that reside off campus, or you are developing an online course, ensuring that your video will play for people outside the Creighton campus becomes paramount.

If you know someone that has internet access off the Creighton campus and is not located at a place that enjoys corporate level internet access, it would be wise to ask them to view your video to judge what their viewing experience is like. A real world test before the course begins will save hours of headaches from complaining students in the future.

1. If your video is 30 frames per second and the persentation size is 640 X 480, your video will not stream to 80% of your audience. Try to make the viewing size 320 X 240 and the frames per second 15 this will dramatically cut down on the needed bandwidth to view the video.