The NET TOOB Stream Player by Duplexx Software Inc. is an inline MPEG audio/video player. It enables you to view MPEG-1 videos from your hard drive and from the Web and Corporate Intranets as they download to your computer.

System Requirements
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• Mac OS 7.5.3 or higher (Threads Manager required ).
  
  
• Netscape Navigator (version 2.0 or higher).
  
  PowerPC processor.
  
  
• 14.4 kbps modem or faster.

Using the NET TOOB Stream Player
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• Start Netscape.

• To play an MPEG video on the Internet--find an HTML link to an MPEG file, click on it, and the NET TOOB Stream Player will download and play it! After it has completed downloading, click on it again to get full motion quality playing from the cache. We have collected, on our site, many links to interesting sites that contain MPEG video files.

• If you open a page that has an embedded MPEG video, such as this page, only the first frame of the video will be shown (unless the page's author specified that it should play automatically, which is described below). To start the video playing, left mouse click on the play button in the lower left hand corner.

• While a video is playing, the play button is replaced by a stop button . To stop the video, click on the stop button. Clicking anywhere on the video will also stop the video.

• As you download the file, a speaker symbol will appear if the file has sound, and a dimmed out speaker symbol will appear if the file is silent or if the computer does not have the required processing power to transmit the sound with the video.

• After the MPEG file has played to completion, a disk button will appear on the tool bar next to the play button . If you would like to save the file, click on this disk button. A "Save As..." dialog will appear so you may save the file to your hard drive.

• To replay an MPEG video, click on the play button in the lower left hand corner of the NET TOOB Stream Player control bar. NOTE: To play back a video from the cache on the disk, you must allow the video to play to completion the first time, otherwise the video will not be saved in the disk cache file.

• To load an MPEG video from your hard drive, choose "File" on Netscape's menu bar. Then select "Open File...". Then select the file and press the "Open" button. Or, just drag the file over to Netscape's window. The MPEG video will start to play automatically!

• Clicking on the logo in the lower right corner will open an about window. Clicking on the NET TOOB Stream home button will take you to the NET TOOB Stream home page. ( You must be connected to the Internet for this to occur )



Release Notes - Macintosh PPC version 1.53
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Please send problem reports to support@nettoob.com and suggestions to info@nettoob.com. Please read the following text carefully to understand the configuration, installation, and operational requirements of the Player.

There are some problems with both the Player and its supporting environment, Netscape Navigator.

Recommendations:

• Turn off virtual memory in the memory control panel if you have enough built in memory. A lot of disk I/O can cause frame skipping and sound gapping during movie play.

• Increasing Netscape's Disk Cache. You can improve the performance of the NET TOOB Stream Player and Netscape Navigator by increasing the size of the disk cache allocated for Netscape Navigator. To do this, pull down the Apple menu and select Memory from the Control Panels sub-menu. Then use arrows in the control associated with the Disk Cache to set the value to 2000K (or more). You must have Netscape's disk cache on if you want to save MPEG files with the NET TOOB Stream MPEG player. The size of the MPEG files to be saved by the player are limited by Netscape's disk cache size.

• Give Netscape additonal memory.

Present Limitations:

• Mac OS 7.5.3 or higher is recommended. For older versions of the Macintosh operating system make sure that the Threads Manager extension is present in the Extensions folder ( which is in the system folder ). The NET TOOB Stream Player uses relatively new features of the Macintosh operating system in order to offer reliable and enjoyable video playback.

• Memory Management: At this time there are some memory management limitations between Mac operating system and Netscape. We recommend that you increase the memory allocated for Netscape by 2 MB. You can do this by selecting the Netscape Navigator icon, and then choosing "Get Info" from the file menu. Change the Preferred Size to reflect the increased amount of memory. It is recommended to periodically restart Netscape if you view many MPEG files because Netscape's memory gets fragmented.

  note: If the player detects that there is not enough memory available, then it will display to the user an alert message recommending to restart Netscape. The player will not load in this case.

• Broken Puzzle Piece Icon (All versions of Netscape Navigator): The Player will fail to load, displaying a broken puzzle piece icon, if there is not enough memory allocated to Netscape. See "Memory Management" note above.

• Broken Puzzle Piece Icon (Netscape Navigator 2.x limitation): You may see some screen/window flashing during the first frame preview. The NET TOOB Stream Player uses the "Image" reload control of Netscape to accomplish the "first frame preview" feature. This is because any partially downloaded video file results in a broken icon represented by Netscape at the video's location on the screen. The "Image" reload option of the browser enables the NET TOOB Stream Player to repaint the video image over the top of the broken icon image. Future versions of Netscape will permit us to eliminate this problem (see note below).

• Other instances where the Broken Puzzle Piece Icon may appear are:

  Stopping the video while in a full screen-playing mode (i.e. when the video is the only item on the screen), will result in a broken icon. Clicking the "Image load" button will not restart or refresh the image on the screen. Nevertheless the reload button will replay the video. Future versions of Netscape will allow us to eliminate this problem (see note below).

  Broken icons will also occur as a result of stopping the video when using Netscape frames (that is, if the Web page developer used the "FRAMES=YES" option in the EMBED statement on the Web page. Use "Image load" to start playing the video again. Again, this problem is very similar to the above two. And as before, future versions of Netscape will allow us to eliminate this problem (see note below).

• Netscape's Frames (Netscape Navigator 2.x limitation). If the NET TOOB Stream Player is used on a page with Netscape frames, the Player will begin looping. We have incorporated a new option that tells the NET TOOB Stream Player it is working within frames. FRAMES=YES The Web page developer should use this option with the EMBED statement on the Web page. As Netscape improves its streaming interface, this problem will be resolved.

  note: Netscape Navigator version 3.0 beta 5 does fix the broken icon problem. The NET TOOB Stream Player detects Netscape Navigator 3.0b5 and is subsequently able to take advantage of its architectural improvements.

• Due to current architectural limitations, the NET TOOB Stream Player is limited only to one instance. e.g. If multiple MPEG files are embedded in the same page only one instance of the player will appear. If multiple browsers are open with MPEG files, only one player will be present in one of the browsers.



For Advanced Users
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Performance Issues

The NET TOOB Stream Player implements several strategies for pacing and synchronizing its video playback. It helps to understand these strategies when you are designing video content to achieve maximum quality and visual impact.

When the NET TOOB Stream Player encounters a video stream for the first time, it assumes there is no sound until sound data is encountered in the video stream. For this reason, you may sometimes see the no sound symbol (speaker with a red X through it) momentarily before seeing the sound symbol and begin hearing sound.

Until sound is encountered in the stream, the NET TOOB Stream Player uses an unsynchronized strategy. This means it plays every video frame in the stream. If you have a fast machine (or low-bandwidth video), the NET TOOB Stream Player will have spare processing time and will wait between frames so they are displayed at the right speed. If your machine is slow relative to the video bandwidth, the NET TOOB Stream Player is designed to display every frame, even if this means the video plays slower than specified in the video stream. Consequently, on fast machines the NET TOOB Stream Player will play at the right speed, on slow machines it will play as fast as it can but that might be slower than the video specifies.

When sound is encountered in the stream, the NET TOOB Stream Player switches to a synchronized strategy. This means basically that one or more video frames may be dropped in order to ensure that the video is delivered at the right speed. Most often this is unnoticeable, but occasionally may result in images that seem to "pause" momentarily while playing. A consequence of playing sound and video together is that the sound decompression places an additional load on processing power, and can reduce the video quality as the NET TOOB Stream Player tries to compensate by devoting more processing time to the audio decompression.

While using a synchronized strategy (when sound is present in the stream), the NET TOOB Stream Player detects the processor load dynamically and alters video quality on-the-fly by dropping video frames as needed. If, in order to stay synchronized with the sound, video quality drops below a certain point, the NET TOOB Stream Playerwill stop playing sound altogether, and revert to an unsynchronized strategy for playing video as described above. At this point you may still see the sound symbol, but the NET TOOB Stream Player has determined there are insufficient processor resources to play video and sound together, so it has reverted to playing no sound, and playing every frame of video as fast as it can, even if that is slower than the ideal frame rate. You can force the NET TOOB Stream Player to try this again by pressing the Reload button on Netscape. The NET TOOB Stream Player will start the whole sequence over from scratch, attempting to play both sound and video.

If the NET TOOB Stream Player is having trouble processing video fast enough to keep up with the sound, you may occasionally hear gaps or silent spots in the sound. Sometimes it may recover and play sound smoothly again, in other situations it will just drop sound altogether. In either case, this is an indication that the video is pushing the limits of your machine.



Please email your suggestions to:
info@nettoob.com

Please email your problems to:
support@nettoob.com

For additional information:
http://www.nettoob.com

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© 1997, 1996 by Duplexx Software Inc.
Duplexx Software Inc., 35 Congress Street, Salem, Massachusetts 01970, USA