VivoActive Player for ActiveX
Company Name: Vivo Software, Inc.
Address: 411 Waverly Oaks Road, Suite 313 Waltham, MA 02154 USA
Telephone: 617-899-8900
FAX: 617-899-1400
Sales/Product Info E-Mail: sales@vivo.com
Product Support E-Mail: support@vivo.com
World Wide Web www.vivo.com
Location on CD-ROM: /ActiveX/Vivo
Installation: Click here to install VVWEB.OCX into your System32 directory and register this OCX
VivoActive from Vivo Software is the world's first SERVERLESS streaming video product, and our users report in great numbers that they get excellent video quality even at very low bit rates. Since there's no server component, the high cost and hassle of providing streaming video are eliminated. Now, even over 28.8 modems, Web surfers can watch uninterrupted streaming audio/video content that pretty much starts to play when they click.
How does Vivo do it? With our revolutionary audio/video compression tool called the VivoActive Producer. There are two versions of the VivoActive Producer -- one that runs on IBM-compatible PC's under Windows 95 or NT -- and one that runs on PowerMacs. The Windows 95 or NT version compresses Video for Windows (.AVI) files into a much smaller VIVO formatted (.VIV) file. Similarly, the PowerMac version of the VivoActive Producer compresses QuickTime (.MOV) files into VIVO formatted files.
To watch the videos created by the VivoActive Producer, you need to have installed a VivoActive Player. VivoActive Players are available for a variety of browsers and operating platforms and can be downloaded for free our Web site.
The VIVO format uses the international video and audio compression standards from the world of low bitrate videoconferencing, namely H.263 video compression and G.723 audio compression. H.263 is based on Discrete Cosine Transform algorithms, which are much more efficient than fractal or wavelet algorithms. (For example, a 30 megabyte .AVI file containing roughly 30 seconds of video can be compressed to under 100 kilobytes by our VivoActive Producer!) Once the original .AVI file is converted to a .VIV file, the Web site developer simply uses the HTML <EMBED> command to embed the VIVO file into the Web page, the same way he or she would embed a .GIF or .JPG file. So the HTML document, and the VIVO video file it references, can live on any old Web server, not just some special video server. And with one copy of the VivoActive Producer, you can compress and distribute all the video content you want, to as many people as you want. You don't have to pay "by the stream" as is the case with competitive products.
There are free VivoActive Players for a variety of browsers and platforms (plug-ins for Netscape Navigator on the Macintosh, Windows 95, Window NT, Windows 3.1, and an ActiveX control for Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows 95 or NT) which perform the video and audio decoding on your machine "on-the-fly." The video is streamed from the Web server via HTTP over TCP, just like the rest of the page, so it goes through all firewalls and doesn't require special UDP ports to be opened (or deals to be made with firewall providers) which is the case with competitive products. Therefore, your VivoActive videos will reach the widest possible audience -- all those people who surf the Web from their PC's at work behind firewalls. If they can see your page, they can watch your video.
Absolutely the only thing a Web server administrator has to do is add a new MIME type table entry to associate .VIV files with VivoActive video. (For more information on this topic, see the section entitled Special Assistance for Web Site Developers elsewhere on this site.)
Purchasing information: The product is free of charge. You can go to www.vivo.com to download the most current version. During the download process, you will asked for your name and e-mail and that will register you.
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