Schweitzer Fachinformationen
Wenn es um professionelles Wissen geht, ist Schweitzer Fachinformationen wegweisend. Kunden aus Recht und Beratung sowie Unternehmen, öffentliche Verwaltungen und Bibliotheken erhalten komplette Lösungen zum Beschaffen, Verwalten und Nutzen von digitalen und gedruckten Medien.
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting a grip on streaming media
Figuring out streaming media devices
Making sense of how streaming works
Talking about streaming apps and hardware
Electronics such as Amazon's Fire TV devices - the Fire TV Stick, Fire Stick 4K, and Fire TV Cube - are streaming media devices.
If that sentence makes perfect sense to you, then you may want to move on to Chapter 2 because the next few pages probably won't tell you anything you don't already know. However, if you're scratching your head in bafflement, get comfy and prepare to be de-baffled!
In this chapter, you explore the two-sides-of-the-same-coin ideas of streaming media and streaming media devices, which are at the core of the Fire TV experience. Do you really need to know this background to use Fire TV? Will having a working definition of streaming benefit you when you're binge-watching Fleabag? Well, okay, the honest answer is "No" on both counts. Or, I should say, the answer is "No" if you don't care about getting the most out of your Fire TV investment, you're not the least bit curious how this technology works, or you're 100 percent certain that you'll never have problems with Fire TV. If that's you, start flipping ahead to the next chapter; otherwise, it's time to discover what this streaming business is all about.
If you were around for the early days of the web - I'm talking about the mid to late 1990s - then you probably remember when the web pages of that era, which contained mostly text with a few images, started giving way to pages that contained media - music, TV shows, and even short movies. That was a fun development, but no one would have described it as "on-demand" entertainment because it could take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more for the media you clicked to download to your computer. Crucially, you had to wait until the entire media file was downloaded before you could start the playback. Inevitably, with Murphy's Law ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong") in full effect back then (as it is today), the longer you had to wait for a media file to download, the more likely it was that the download would crash when it was 99 percent complete.
The molasses-in-January pace and the don't-breathe-until-it's-done fragility of media downloads were facts of online life back then, but a few nerds started thinking there had to be a better way. They realized that for most people, however slow their download speed, it was still faster than the rate at which they listened to or watched whatever media was being downloaded. Why was this speed difference important? Because it meant that after at least some of the media was downloaded, it could start playing from the beginning and the rest of the download could continue in the background without fear that the user would "catch up" to the download and be forced to wait. (To be sure, there was always some fear involved; see Murphy's Law.)
This breakthrough meant that most media would start playing within a few seconds. It also meant that, usually, the media was never really "downloaded" to the user's computer; instead, when the media started playing, it would continue to play until it was over or the user moved on to something else. Consuming media online became like sitting on the bank of a stream watching the water flow by, so some sensitive poet of an engineer coined the term streaming to describe this new way of listening to and viewing media.
Nowadays, streaming has gone, well, mainstream for a couple of reasons. First, many users now have computers and/or mobile devices that are powerful enough to process even the largest and most complex incoming audio and video signals. Second, lots of people (at least in the developed world) have speedy Internet connections and home networks, which means that streams usually start within a few seconds and the streaming buffer - the area of memory that's used to store the next few seconds or minutes of the media (more on this a bit later) - is always full, which results in a continuous and glitch-free playback.
Streaming today usually comes in one of the following forms:
Imagine yourself sitting on the bank of a fast-running stream. Your eyes see the water whooshing by; your ears hear the babbling of the brook; your nose smells the wonderful scent of clean water; if you feel like it, you could also use your hands or feet to sense the coolness of the stream and your tongue to taste the freshness of pure water. In much the same way that your senses give you "access" to a stream, you need a special device to "access" an online media stream.
Sometimes that device is just a piece of software. For example, when you click to play a YouTube video, the YouTube site streams that video using special playback software that runs right in your web browser.
Increasingly these days, however, that device is a piece of hardware called a streaming media device, and it offers two main features:
Amazon gadgets such as the Fire TV Stick, Fire TV Stick 4K, and Fire TV Cube are streaming media devices that use your TV or a mobile device to display a streaming service interface and play audio, video, and live streams, which you can control using either the bundled remote or Alexa voice commands.
As you might imagine, streaming media is a hideously complex bit of business that requires extremely sophisticated hardware and software to make everything work as well as it does. The good news is that you don't need to know anything about that complexity, so you can shut off all those alarm bells going off in your head. Instead, this section provides you with a very basic overview of how streaming performs its magic.
The general process for streaming a prerecorded audio or video file is illustrated in Figure 1-1.
FIGURE 1-1: An overview of how streaming works.
As Figure 1-1 shows, streaming is a five-step process
When the data reaches the user's network, the network's wireless router passes the data along to the streaming media device.
Note that the router is usually wireless, but it doesn't have to be.
The streaming media device waits until it has a certain amount of the media before it starts the playback.
The saved data is stored in a special memory location called a buffer. (See the next section, "More about buffering," for, well, more about buffering.)
The buffering process that occurs in steps 4 and 5 of the previous section is such a crucial part of streaming that it goes on throughout the playback, not just at the beginning. For example, when you examine the current progress of the playback, you usually see a progress bar that's similar to what I've illustrated in Figure 1-2. The circle shows your current position in the playback. Just ahead of the circle is a dark portion of the progress bar, which shows you how much of the upcoming stream is stored in the buffer; the rest of the progress bar is white, which tells you that part of the stream hasn't yet been received by the streaming media device. (The colors may vary on your TV or mobile device.)
Why not just play the media as it arrives and skip the buffer altogether? That would be nice, and it just might work in an ideal world, but the world we actually inhabit is far from ideal. In real life, media...
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