Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 61) authoring programs like Macromedia Director, Sound Edit Pro, and later on, Flash. You could add multiple audio tracks to a QuickTime movie for English- or Spanish-option audio playback— which was a must for a publisher trying to land an adoption in Texas or California. You could lay down cue points in QuickTime soundtracks with Sound Edit, which could be used to trigger various interactive elements in a program. And you could create separate sprite tracks with their own interactive features. Just for starters. As one example, when I was working on an interactive tutorial for Harvard Medical School, we were just beginning to implement a simple but effective DRM feature on the QuickTime progressive downloads. The poor quality of streaming in Real discouraged the medical directors of the program; they wanted the higher quality that QuickTime delivered in progressive mode, but they were worried about the content being copied and ending up on other websites. Matthew Peterson’s solution, which he outlined using Totally Hip’s LiveStage Pro, was just the answer for us. We coded some Qt Script tracks in the movies, which blocked any viewing of content if the movie found it was no longer on its home server. Speaking of Live Stage Pro, another sign of interactive QuickTime’s eclipse is dramatically illustrated by the decline of that authoring program—it has been dormant since its last version (developed specifically for QuickTime 6), with no apparent plans for a version to work with QuickTime 7. Lead developers Steve Israelson and Selwyn Wan, two of the original Totally Hip founders, have left the company to work independently. “I was the main and usually only Mac programmer for LiveStage and also its architect,” Israelson says. “Selwyn was the lead programmer for the Windows version. Together, we put together the last few versions of LiveStage. We still have many ideas that would make LiveStage even better. The grim reality is that the sales of LiveStage did not support its development and thus further development on it was halted. “Apple helped us a lot with great technical support,” he adds, “and the help of the QuickTime engineering team. The direction Apple has taken QuickTime, however, did not help us at all. Just when we came out with several great components for QuickTime to support better scripting and spectrograms, Apple halted the component download program. You can see what direction they are going very clearly. Basically they appear to want to delete everything except industry-standard video and sound.” Whither Interactivity? The change in Apple’s attitude toward QuickTime’s WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 61 http://www.digital-rapids.com http://www.digital-rapids.com http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM
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