Book Image

Plone 3 Multimedia

By : Tom Gross
Book Image

Plone 3 Multimedia

By: Tom Gross

Overview of this book

<p>Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Multimedia provides us with stunning interactive user experiences and many design options, but it requires discipline and knowledge to utilize it effectively so that we do not alienate our audiences. By providing an overview of multimedia content together with a practical focus on how to process it in the web context, this book will be your ideal partner when turning your Plone site into a full-featured multimedia Internet presence.<br /><br />From watermarked images, integrated Silverlight-applications over geotagged content and rich podcasts to protected video-on-demand solutions this book provides a rich repository of tools and techniques to add full multimedia power to Plone. This step-by-step guide will show you how to collaborate with many external web resources to build a powerful interactive Plone site that perfectly meet your needs.<br /><br />Multimedia data is a very important part of the Internet, considering the amount of storage and bandwidth taken. This book will show you how to turn your multimedia data in valuable multimedia content by using the mature and extensible open source CMS Plone.<br /><br />With its content-centric approach Plone allows specialized use-case scenarios for image, audio, video, Flash and Silverlight applications. The initial chapters focus on managing image, audio, video, and flash content for your Plone website. We then plunge into content control and syndication. <br /><br />The book will show you how to structure your content by tagging, rating, and geolocating. It will give you insights on how to upload, store, and serve your multimedia content in an effective way.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Plone 3 Multimedia
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Syndication Formats
Index

Audio formats


Before we go on with Plone and see how we can enhance the story of audio processing and manipulate audio data, we will glance at audio formats. We will see how raw audio data is compressed to enable effective audio storage and streaming. We need to have some basic audio know-how about some of the terminology to understand how we can effectively process audio for our own purposes.

As with images, there are several formats in which audio content can be stored. We want to learn a bit of theoretical background. This eases the decision of choosing the right format for our use case.

An analog acoustic signal can be displayed as a wave:

If digitalized, the wave gets approximated by small rectangles below the curve. The more rectangles are used the better is the sound (fidelity) of the digital variant. The width of the rectangles is called the sampling rate.

Usual sampling rates include:

  • 44.1 kHz (44,100 samples per second): CD quality

  • 32 kHz: Speech

  • 14.5 kHz: FM radio bandwidth

  • 10 kHz...