Watch New Movie Secrets 3

Streaming technology has made listening to music or watching movies on the web as easy as turning on the radio or TV. Here's how the technology works.

The very first music and view free movie (related web-site) files you could find on the net were just short clips because you had to download the entire file before you could play it. Nowadays, on the other hand, you may start playing the file as soon as the very first bytes begin to arrive... as a result of streaming.

This immediacy is possible because streaming does not send files online the same as most other files are sent. It uses a different protocol.

A protocol is a set of rules defining how two computers connect with each other and how they send each other data.

Most data which is sent through the internet is first broken up into packets (small blocks of data). The packets are sent separately and are the rejoined at their destination in order that the receiver gets the whole file.

The sending of most data on the web is governed by a group of rules called the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Streaming however uses the User Database Protocol (UDP).

These two protocols are quite different. The crucial difference is in how they look for errors.

If one packet gets damaged when downloading is being controlled by TCP, downloading will be suspended while that packet is resent. That way, after the download has been completed, you can make certain that you've got the whole data file.

Whenever you are streaming files, conversely, UDP allows packets to get lost now and after that without interrupting the downloading. This is fine because, when an occasional packet is lost, you are unlikely to notice any interruption to the music or movie. But if everything froze very briefly while a lost packet was being resent, you probably would notice the interruption.

With streaming technology, you do not have to wait for files to be downloaded entirely before you decide to can begin listening to audio or watching a video. You can listen to a concert on the other side of the world in real time, make a video call or watch a film just like on tv.

Streaming video works in a similar way to streaming audio, except that the video must be split into its separate audio and video components when it really is within the buffer in the RAM.

The server that holds the video for streaming may have a video capture expansion card which can capture either a live feed from a video camera or a pre-recorded video. The capture board turns the analogue signals it receives into digital data and compresses it.

At the exact same time, it employs a trick in order to avoid having to capture more data than it needs in order to make transmission easier.

When the camera used to record the video is stationary, ie, it's not panning, the amount of data created may be reduced. This could be done because all moving images are made up of a series of frames (still images) that change in rapid succession to offer the illusion of continuous movement. The rate can be 30 frames a second which gives the video a smooth look.

The compression system reduces the range of frames needed by comparing adjacent frames and only taking account of pixels that change from one frame to another. It does this by establishing exactly what the background looks like.

As long as the camera remains but, only the changes within the frame, such as the movement of the actors, have to be transmitted. The background only has to be transmitted again in the event the camera starts to pan and the background changes.

Video streaming will likely skip frames when your Internet link is slow, which may make the video jerky. Thus the faster your connection, the smoother the video will be.

When your computer receives the video signals, it will decompress them and load them in to a small buffer in RAM as it does for audio.

At this point the signals are split into separate video and audio components that are sent to the video card and sound card respectively, whence they can be output to your monitor and speakers so you may watch the movie and hear the sound-track.