Tip #2280 - Streaming
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Q:
What does streaming mean?
A:
You may have seen the word streaming in various places. Streaming often
has to do with audio and video formats, so if you deal a lot with music
or video in your daily computing activities, you may run across streaming
quite a bit.
Basically, streaming is when
a multimedia file is able to be played back on your computer without it
being fully downloaded. It takes quite a bit of time to download media
files, so streaming comes in to help display the data before the full
file is transmitted onto your computer.
For streaming to run
smoothly, the data must be able to be sent as a steady stream while converting
it to either sound or picture. If the data goes too fast for what your
system can handle, that's when buffering
comes into play. On the other hand, if the data is not processed quickly
enough, the stream will not run smoothly and it may be choppy while you
listen to it or view it.
An example of streaming
is when you go to one of your favorite music artist's Web sites and they
have a sample of their new song for you to listen to. This would be a
streaming file, because you never actually downloaded the song. The option
on the Web site is just a way for you to hear part of the song, so you
will be interested in getting the whole thing later on.
Files from Real
Audio or QuickTime
are often streaming documents as well. But, if you use shareware software
from the Internet or if you often download software updates, those are
not streaming data, because you went through the complete download process
of them for extended use.
~ Erin
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