Video in Interactive Media Technologies

Codec’s are used to compress all kinds of file, from video, to game. There are specific Codec’s for each kind of file, and to use them you need the same codec on both ends of the file compression transfer. A codec is needed to compress files to send over the internet, seeing as the average download speed is about 2MB/s and a full length film is around 800MB it would take a long time to download, so codec’s are used to compress these files down to make it easier for download. However to decompress these files you need the same codec on your side of the transfer, for example MPEG-4 is one of the most commonly used codec’s on windows computers, and are preinstalled on things like windows media player so when you download files there are automatically decompressed for you.
If you are downloading a game file however you would need a different kind of codec to work off. WinRar is one of these; it can open and decompress files to full size to be able to transfer onto disk. These are good ways of transferring data as it helps downloading take less time, but is only good if you have the right codec to work with.

Downloading is the transfer of files from one computer to another via the internet. There are many factors which affect download speed and how things need to be downloaded. The speed of downloads is conveyed in its bit rate, this is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. For example if an average sized door was the bit rate and a person was the file to be downloaded the loading speed would be extremely quick. However if you were trying to fit an elephant through this door it would take an extremely long time. The average download speed of a computer is 2megabits per second.
Frame rates are the measure of the rate or frequency at which an image device produces unique consecutive images. The FPS (frames per second) of a video is the speed at which the images in the video are played, in British cinema the FPS of a movie is 25 FPS, and in American cinema it is 24 FPS. FPS can be compressed to about 12-12.5 FPS before you start really noticing a change, the lower the FPS is the more jerky a movie will seem, whereas the higher FPS the smoother the movie will run. Video files compressed for download are usually compressed to 12-12.5 FPS to make the file smaller making it easier to send or be downloaded.
Screen Resolutions convey the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed; this can change the size of the screen to the amount of colour shown on the screen. The size of the screen can depend on the resolution you need for a good image, for example a smaller computer monitor would possibly only need a resolution of 800x600 to show a nice clear image, but a bigger screen may need a resolution of 1440x900 to show a clearer image.
File sizes are measured in; Kilobytes, Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, Petabytes, Exabytes, Zetabytes, and Yottabytes. 1 KB is the smallest size you can get, and you can fit 1000KB in 1 MB, this trend carries on for the rest of the spectrum; 1000 MB in 1 GB etc. The size of a file will depend on how fast it is downloaded from the internet; a smaller file size will be downloaded faster than a larger one.

Picture ratios are used for video production all over the world. The ratios are used to make sure there is a universal size for, film, TV etc. The old picture ration used to be 4:3 making video and TV extremely box shaped in size, nowadays however the picture ratio is 16:9 giving a more panoramic, widescreen view. The picture ration is only a guideline, because as long as you stick to the ratio it doesn’t matter about the size of it, the screen could be from 16cm x 9cm or even 16 miles x 9 miles, as long as the ratio stays the same the video will stay the same quality.
These videos have to be played on the right media players. If you have a DVD it would need to be played on a DVD player, or you would need to have a DVD drive on your computer. To play these on computers, you can get DVD programs for your computer, such as Power DVD, to give a good quality film. On Apple Macs, the primary media player is QuickTime, this is apples own media player and plays all videos made for Apple Mac, or downloaded onto a Mac computer. For Windows, the media player is Windows media player, which plays all video files from the internet, and also MP3 and WAV files for computers. This means you can listen to music as well as watch videos on this programme. For mobile phones you have Real player, which is a smaller media player and is what Smart phones etc use to play downloaded videos on. This is a lower quality player but works with smaller mobile videos. If you wanted to watch TV or listen to Radio on the internet when you wanted there are site such as BBC Iplayer, which lets you watch TV on demand and listen to radio from any of its various stations, live or Pre-recorded. Media players are good because it means that anyone can download videos and watch them rather than have to trouble with acquiring the correct codec for the job.

Streaming video is what is done on sites like YouTube or Newgrounds, and is majorly user-generated content. This means you can put anything you want on the internet to share with anyone; these videos are only viewable on the internet and don’t involve any downloading.
You can embed certain videos off YouTube onto a blog or any other website you may own. This is useful if you are writing up about these things or just want to show off a good video. Embedding involves taking the specific HTML format and copying it onto a different site to show the video as it is in its own little player. You can choose the sizes of these as well if you wanted a larger video than normal.
Videos can also be tagged with certain keywords associated with the content in the video, making the video searchable on Google, or Bing for example, this can help you get your video onto the web quicker and found by people searching for your keywords. This works on streamed videos as well as downloaded videos so you can choose to get the video either way.