One of the things I've been roundly criticized for, with relation to steamlocomotive.info is how badly the video clips transfer/display on the visitors web browser.

Originally, we thought about implemented a Real Media Server and storing the video clips as .rm files, but the cost of staging a Real Media Streaming Server was prohibitive.

The idea of using a Microsoft solution was also discarded. We're in the process (today) of installing the Windows version of Apple's QuickTime Streaming Server on a Windows 2000 Server, and will use it to test delivery of our video clips. Those clips that aren't in QuickTime format will be resampled.

If this works well and provides a nice experience for our visitors, we'll move the videos to a Macintosh X-Serve machine, running the native version of QuickTime Streaming Server.

We'll also be putting a button on the front of the website to allow you to download QuickTime if you don't have it.

We currently have clips of 53 locomotives on the system, but have video tape of over 100 more locomotives to digitize. We'll proceed with that effort when we're convinced that our delivery method works well.

Regards,
Doug


Steam Locomotive Information
dougb@sunserver.com