Glossary of terms used on this site
- Bitrate Switching
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Stream high-quality video from a low-speed connection (i.e. limited bandwidth) and you will inevitably experience the data buffer, often indicated by the maddening “buffering” signal. To solve this problem, the Player utilizes a feature known as bitrate switching. Through a server-independent mechanism, the player is supplied with multiple versions of the same video and selects the version that best matches a viewer’s screen size and bandwidth. So, those with a broadband connection can watch the HD version of your video, while those with dial-up access will get a low-quality, but still smooth-playing, version. Bitrate switching is automatic in the Player and requires no action from the viewer
- Download
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Copying the video file from the web server to your computer. When downloading a video, a user must wait for the entire file to be transfered in order to watch it. Since video files tend to be very large, the download process can be a very long time, and require a great amount of disk space to store the files.
- Institutional Access
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This method, as the name implies, is our mechanism to allow purchases made by an administrator or librarian to be made available to everyone in your institution without the need of additional passwords or login credentials.
If your institution uses a proxy server, or has dedicated IP addresses, you can specify them in your account, and your internal authentication systems insure that your video purchases are available to everyone that needs them.
- Proxy Server
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A proxy server is a server or software that gives the appearance to our servers that an off-campus request is coming from a known on-campus IP address. The proxy server handles authentication using some sort of password-protected page on your main site, with user credentials usually supplied from a database or directory, such as LDAP.
- Streaming
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Streaming video is content sent in compressed form over the Internet and displayed by the viewer in real time. With streaming video, a user does not have to wait to download a file to play it. Instead, the media is sent in a continuous stream of data and is played as it arrives. The user needs a player, which is a special program that uncompresses and sends video data to the display and audio data to speakers.
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