This is easier than signing up for a Web mail account-just enter your email address and a password gets mailed back to you. Although free space is available to the home user and experimenter, Real also offers commercial space to businesses. So once you've perfected the slide show technique, you don't have to set up your own G2 Server-farm it out as you would Web page delivery. While RealSlideshow is an inexpensive research platform to learn the ins and outs of streaming media, Real offers several other useful tools. RealPlayer 7 can simulate viewer connection speeds from the lowliest modem to T1 and mimic the effect of packet loss on streaming sound and image content.
Packet loss occurs under normal network conditions.
Try all possible scenarios and learn the impact of your choices at different rates, trading off image size for compression and how long you have to wait at the various speeds for the slide show to begin. Soon you will become savvy and able to gauge what various content will look and sound like merely by file size and the resulting Kbps stream value. This is a skill that also comes in handy with other types of streaming content and tools. Most of the basic issues and trade-offs are the same. Before you make the jump to video, it pays to exhaust the slide show format's possibilities.