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With the Helix Universal Server, users have a choice as to how they could deliver streaming media to an audience. Some considerations should be made depending on the desired effect.
The first of these considerations is the file format. In the streaming media world, the choice of commercial offerings on what the best format to use is purely up to the users and standards of organizations. In an educational environment it is generally safe to assume that an audience could have access to just about anything. With some good instruction and a broadband Internet connection, most compatibility issues can be resolved quickly if the end user is not up to par on a streaming media content choice made by an author.
Not under consideration because it’s not supported by the Helix Universal Server, yet worth mentioning, is that Macromedia’s Flash Video format has the greatest potential for web penetration because it only requires the <1MB download of the Flash Player v6 or higher. Flash has about a 95% user distribution on the Internet already so in theory if all video on the web were required to be in Flash, compatibility issues would be reduced quite a bit. While it can stream simple Flash animations, the Helix Universal Server doesn’t support Flash Video (flv) natively, and the authoring process for streaming flash video from its proprietary flash server is somewaht complex for beginners, so this isn’t really an option at this point in time. Maybe someday, but not right now for general use.
Different player capabilities can also determine what an author might choose. For example the Apple QuickTime player will not play full screen without the ~$30 purchase of QuickTime Pro. If the user wishes to stretch out the screen manually, this is possible with any version of QuickTime. However for a Television-like experience, this is not possible without purchasing the Pro version. RealMedia and Windows Media come with this feature for free, and both players are available on the more popular desktop computing formats (Windows and Macintosh).
An overview with working examples of each format that the Helix Universal Server can stream are here:
Clip Delivery for Windows Media | Clip Delivery for QuickTime | Other Formats