William Wilson
Colorado Springs, Colorado
wwilson@offspring.net

HotMedia

        Java was developed at Sun Microsystems in 1991 and was originally intended for smart appliances (Ditto,1998). It rapidly evolved into a useful language for delivering multimedia content over the internet. It can deliver multimedia content to different computer platforms as long as they have Java enabled browsers. It does this by delivering the content within small packaged programs called applets. The browser reads the applets and performs the necessary program instructions such as displaying a video and allowing for more viewer interaction without the use of plugins.

Java on a web page creates a rich media experience for viewers. Market research has demonstrated that rich media can enhance a business web page. Customers stay at the site and eventually buy something (Senna,2000).

Creating Java applets can be difficult for people with limited Java programming experience. IBM's HotMedia allows the Java novice to create rich Java media within a fairly easy to use graphical user interface (Figure 1). HotMedia can assemble audio, video, and still images into Java applets that are easily placed into an html document.

HotMedia can produce the following types of media:

• Thumbnails that can scroll and include hotspot links

• Animation from a series of single images and can be interactive

• Virtual Reality 3D. http://vr-objects.com/

• Panoramic shots http://haughtmedia.webjump.com/portpan/data/pan.html

• Background audio.

• Sycnchronized video with audio.

• Streaming video and audio down to 28kbs. http://haughtmedia.webjump.com/portpan/data/port.html

Figure 1

Advantages:
Free from Ibm http://www.IBM.com
Products can be viewed on any Java enabled browser without plugins

Disadvantages:
Can not animate vector graphics.
Not the best documentation.

1. Create audio and visual elements using your graphics and sound programs. I used 3d Studio Max to create a video(avi) file and I extracted my sound file from a CD using Goldwave.

2. Run Hotmedia and select the type of media you want to produce. I chose video and then added my 3d avi file. You will be asked to select the output of the ultimate product. I chose 28kbs as I wanted the streaming video to be close to the original video quality. This will not stream well over internet connections here in southern New Mexico, though. Setting the value lower than this creates noticable compression artifacts but would allow it to be streamed even here in New Mexico. You can preview your options and change values until your satisfied. Save your file at this point.

3. Now, you will want to produce your applet file and html file. Go to file and publish and set the destination for your files. Hotmedia will produce three types of files; an mcr file, html file, and Java applet class files. You will need to upload most of these files to your ISP so that your web page will display the page correctly.

4. Copy the applet code from the Hotmedia html file and place this code within your webpages html code. You will need to add the codebase attribute so that your applet code resembles this example in every way except your own file names.

<APPLET
ARCHIVE="hm35vid0g0c.zip"
CODE="hm35.class"
NAME="HotMedia"
WIDTH="320"
HEIGHT="240">
<PARAM NAME="mvrfile" value="dog.mvr">
</APPLET>

This is suitable if your files are within the same folder. If you want your html file to be external to the main file folder then consult the Hotmedia documentation. Check out this little streaming video. myvideo Or check this other one out. Doggy Discipline

References
http://www.IBM.com

Ditto, C. 1998. Webmaster Answers. Osborne/McGraw Hill, California.

Senna, J. 2000. HotMedia cooks up sizzling Java-based multimedia. Infoworld, v22,Iss29,pg 68.