Electronic Site

Audio Format

Adding audio to an HTML-only course presents difficulties for course developers. First, multiple audio formats are available on the web today: WAV, AIF, MP3, M4a, etc. Even worse is the vast array of audio-player applications and their file-type associations, both for Mac and Windows platforms.

Flash, however, supports several audio formats and plays them all using the Flash Player, which has a 98% market penetration. You can easily import almost any audio file, add it to the Flash timeline, publish the Flash movie, deliver the course, and be fairly certain that users will be able to hear the audio without having to download an extra player.

Flash has built-in streaming capabilities, so you can be assured that your audio content will be delivered to users without drop-outs and gaps.

At Cyber Work, we use Flash for in-course audio content. Audio is recorded in our audio lab and saved in a common format. The file is then imported into Flash. Action Script is used in conjunction with on-screen buttons, to allow users to control audio playback. This interactive audio file can then be attached to any course, using the Cyber Works Web Author application.

Course Navigation

How smart is your course navigation? By “smart,” I mean can it communicate with your LMS? Most in-course navigation is pretty boring and perfunctory. If you spice up yours with Flash, your courses will become more useable.

Since Flash can work with SCORM and AICC courses, on-screen buttons can be scripted via Action Script to send calls to the LMS for certain conditions. A button at the end of a lesson might send a finish statement to the LMS, signifying lesson completion and triggering further actions. Another button might automatically submit the results of a quiz.

Better learning experiences are possible, since the entire interface is completely customizable, and buttons are very easy to create in Flash. If you want, you can even use its built-in library of buttons to create your course navigation.

At Cyber Works, we retro-fitted some existing e-Learning courses (developed for restaurant employees) for our LMS, complete with all of the calls necessary for course status and completion. These Flash-based courses had a cohesive look and feel that was much more compelling than a plain-text HTML web experience.

See it more at wikipedia.

Adobe Flash

Creating Simulations

Some software tools, such as Camtasia and Captivate, are designed solely for creating software simulations. They have advantages and disadvantages, and Cyber Works does use them, along with other simulation software packages.

Since the Palm software only resides on the Palm Pilot, I couldn’t use a PC-based software-simulation tool to capture screens. So I used my scanner and Photoshop, imported the screens and artwork into Flash, and created the simulation.

At Cyber Works, we are currently working with an Internet company whose proprietary software (for security reasons) only works on computers behind their firewall.

Video

Video is becoming more prevalent on the web these days, with the rise of YouTube and other video-streaming services. Video can significantly enhance course materials, but (as with audio) it can be difficult to manage, due to multiple video formats and players. On the PC, AVI is the dominant format and Windows Media Player is the usual player. On the Mac, MOV is the format of choice and the Quicktime Player from Apple is the dominant player. However, there are other video formats and players, including Real media / Real Player and others.

When Flash MX 2004 was released, video was a major component. And with Flash CS3, video has become even easier to incorporate. You can deploy video on your own server or on a dedicated Flash Streaming Video Server, for extra bandwidth. Flash has its own video format, called Flash Video (FLV). Flash videos can be played by any Flash movie (SWF) file, so no additional player is necessary.

A short demonstration video, not longer than 1 minute, can be embedded in a Flash movie. If you are expecting a lot of traffic and have longer movies, you should use a Flash Video Streaming server.

Cue Points can key off of specific video frames, to control other events. And the new captioning feature can add closed captioning for video segments. At Cyber Works, we created a video of a speaker presenting a slideshow.

Consider your audience and the minimum system requirements necessary to view streaming Flash videos. Dropped frames and inconsistent playback can occur on slower machines.

Car DVD

Knowing what this tuner is can help to answer the question “Car DVD player mysteries: What is DVB-T?”

Basically, the above term is an abbreviation that stands for “Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial.” It is also the industry standard – first developed in Europe by the Digital Video Broadcasting Consortium– for how digital terrestrial television is broadcast.

This standard, in effect, is the “law” for how digital television can be beamed for receipt at the other end by equipment built to this standard and making use of certain tuners.

It first appeared in 1997, from the United Kingdom and is now the recognized standard in many parts of the world and in several countries in the Americas, though not in the United States.

It allows for the efficient compression and streaming of audio, video and other types of data digitally in what is called the MPEG transport system.
Many car DVD players and other devices that are designed to receive and then play digital audio and video come equipped with DVB-T, by the way, though these devices are far more common in Europe and the old British Commonwealth countries than anywhere else.

China and all North American countries make use of a different digital video broadcasting standard, so the chances are slim that one would see a car DVD player equipped with this tuner in those regions.

There are several other different digital television and digital broadcasting standards that exist, with many countries allowing for the manufacture and distribution of car DVD players and other devices that feature not only those tuners but also DVB-T. North American players and devices go with what is known as ATSC.

There are three different standards for DVB-T, so knowing which standard your player is operating under can be important because two of those standards are more recent and equipment making use of older-standard players may not work or interface at all with the newer-standard players.

When buying or selling a car DVD player, it can be important to know how the player handles those signals, as well.

A car DVD player equipped with digital video broadcast capability is all about compression rate, meaning how fast it can squeeze and then decode signals coming from a broadcast source, which will also impact the quality of any pictures displayed.