Overview

So far we've looked at streaming movies, local movies, and Fast Start movies as separate things. Now we'll look at ways to combine streaming media and local media in the same Fast Start movie.

This lets you add things that can't be streamed, such as chapter lists, sprites, and Flash, to your streaming movies.

It also lets you add things that must be streamed, such as live webcasts, to movies on a CD-ROM or a Web server.

You can also mix streaming movies with local and Fast Start movies using Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, as described in "SMIL for the Camera" (page 509). SMIL provides an easy way to mix live streams, stored streams, and other kinds of media in the same presentation.

Adding a Chapter List to a Streaming Movie

Streaming is a great way to deliver long movies; they don't take up any space on the viewer's hard disk, and the viewer can jump to any point in the movie without downloading the intervening material. Streaming delivery is especially nice for lectures or tutorials material that invites the viewer to jump to a particular point in the presentation or to review certain segments multiple times.

Chapter lists are also great for these kinds of movies. They offer the viewer a pop-up list of topics or segments, allowing the viewer to jump directly to the beginning of any segment without having to hunt for it.

This is particularly important for streaming movies because they're hard to hunt around in.