The INTV! Media Chooser component is a software product for HP-UX, Solaris 1, and Solaris 2 that allows you to receive audio and video feeds broadcast by INTV! Stations. The chooser interface allows you to select from INTV! Stations that are present on the network and will dynamically locate any newly installed stations.

This chapter discusses:

• The INTV! Media Chooser
• INTV! Viewer windows

To use the INTV! Media Chooser, you must have installed the INTV! software, correctly licensed the chooser, and set up the necessary environment variables for your workstation. See the Installation section appropriate to your operating system for full information. Issue the following command to run the INTV! Media Chooser:

<directory where INTV! is installed>/bin/intv

If you want to have INTV! automatically start up a viewer for a specific Station, you can do so by passing an optional argument to INTV!. The arguments take the form of StationID@hostname_of_station. For example, if you wanted to start up a viewer for channel 42, a station running on a machine named primus, you would enter the command:

intv 42@primus

When the INTV Media Chooser loads, the application opens a chooser window that provides the user with a list of stations and allows him or her control over which stations are tuned in.

The Media Chooser can be moved around the desktop and can be iconified by selecting the "close" option from its menu. The INTV! Media Chooser allows you to receive up to ten video streams at once. Each video stream would be associated with an INTV! viewer.

You can open up to ten of these viewers on your desktop, but are limited to one viewer per channel.

The Station List gives you a list of active TV Stations on your network. Beside each channel number are the station’s call letter and a brief description of the channel, as set by its administrator, and a picture of a speaker that indicates whether you are listening to audio from that station. There is also a button for each station entry allowing you to select it as the station from which you wish to receive audio. If you are viewing multiple stations, this allows you to choose which one you are listening to on fly. Below the station list is a bar that displays the media that the currently selected station is broadcasting. The two media that viewers receive are Realtime Audio and Realtime Video.

The Station List provides an easy way to select a channel for viewing. You can select a station by clicking on its description line with the left mouse button. The station information line will become highlighted. To tune in the station, simply click on the Tune-In button. If there are more than a screen full of TV Stations listed, use the scrollbar on the right hand side of the window to scroll the listing up and down. As a short cut, you can also double click on a station to automatically tune it in.

The Chooser menu contains options pertaining to stations on the Station List. The options available are Tune In, Tune Out, Get Info, Locate, and Exit. Note that hotkeys for the functions on the menu are listed alongside the menu entries.

The Tune In option tunes in the currently selected station.

The Tune Out menu option tunes out the currently selected station, closing its viewer and turning off its audio.

The Station Information button gives you access to networking information about the currently selected station. It provides you with the name, network address, and the selected station’s TV Station server.

The Locate TV Stations button tells the INTV! Media Chooser to scan the network for active Stations and update the index. Although the INTV! Chooser software will automatically detect the presence of new Stations on the network, it may not always detect which stations have shut down or changed their station information. The INTV! chooser software automatically uses this feature to update the index each time you run the viewer software. If you leave your chooser running for a long period of time, you may want to activate this feature occasionally to assure that your Station Index is up-to-date. The Locate function will only locate stations present on your subnet.

The Exit menu option asks for confirmation, then exits the INTV! Media Chooser. When you exit the Chooser, all of the stations that you are viewing are tuned out.

The Options Menu contains configuration tools for INTV!, including startup options and audio controls.

The Resume Viewers flag indicates whether INTV! will attempt to tune in the stations that you are currently viewing the next time you start INTV!. If this option is on, then INTV! will look for the stations that you have tuned in the next time you run it, and attempt to tune them in on startup.

If this option is on, then when you start INTV!, the Media Chooser will be brought up as an icon rather than as an open window.

Selecting Audio from the Options menu brings up the audio control panel. The audio control panel lets you modify your INTV! Viewer’s audio properties. The options available on the Audio Panel are:

The Volume slider lets you adjust the volume level from 0 to 100 percent. Simply drag the slider to the appropriate setting.

The audio/video sync slider controls the INTV! Chooser’s tolerance to letting the audio and video fall out of synchronization. The higher the number, the more likely the video and audio will stay in synchronization. If you notice "clicking" or breakup in the audio during your viewing session, then you probably have your tolerance setting too high.

INTV! lets you play back audio signals through your workstation’s internal speaker (or speaker box), a pair of headphones, or through a line-out device if available. By default the INTV! Chooser uses the workstation’s speaker, but clicking on the Audio Control panel’s Headset icon will redirect the sound to the headset port, located on the back of your workstation or speaker box. If your workstation has a line-out device and is running SunOS 4.1.3U1 or higher, you can select the line-out device to send the sound to an external unit such as a stereo or PA system.

All monitors vary slightly in the accuracy to which they reproduce colors and shading. To assure accurate color reproduction, you will want to use the Monitor Gamma Correction utility to adjust INTV!’s colors. You should only need to go through this procedure once. Adjust the Red, Green, and Blue sliders until the inner boxes are as close as possible to the color of the outer boxes. Be sure and save your settings.

Whenever you tune in a station that is sending video, an INTV! Viewer will be opened on the desktop. The viewer windows are normal panels with a menu bar on top that includes the Video and Help pull-down menus.

Each viewer window can be dragged around the desktop, iconified, and resized. If you iconify a viewer window, it becomes a video icon. The video shrinks down to icon size, allowing you to monitor the video signal. The window may also be resized, but the video image does not change size to fit the viewer window. To exit the viewer, select Quit from the pull-down menu.

The Video Menu contains the options used to configure the viewer and allows you to capture frames from the video.

These options allow you to load your saved set of default viewer settings, save the current settings as the default, or restore your viewer to the factory defaults respectively.

The Copy command allows you to copy the frame currently on the viewer onto the OpenDVE clipboard, where it can be saved as a file. You can copy a frame while the video is frozen or as it is being shown.

The Freeze command allows you to freeze the current frame in the viewer. You can resume viewing video by selecting Freeze again.

Selecting Settings brings up a panel that allows you to change the settings of your viewer window. The settings mostly pertain to color usage and other aspects of video performance.

The following settings enable the user to customize the performance of their viewer.

This setting works hand in hand with the "Suppress Color Flashing" setting to produce the best possible image when the viewer is not the active window. Color Usage determines how many colors the TV viewer uses from the default colormap. Setting this to "high" will improve image quality, but will leave less colors for other applications to use. If your other applications have difficulty obtaining their necessary colors, reduce the Color Usage setting to low. If problems persist, turn off Suppress Color Flashing.

When video data is lost or corrupted by heavy traffic or other network problems, artifacts may be introduced into the video signal as extra pixels or "trails". If artifact suppression is enabled, the Viewer will remove these defects by briefly pausing the video. Under most configurations, artifacts should not be a problem, and this setting can be disabled.

The Suppress Color Flashing setting is used to enable a viewer window to take colors from the system’s default colormap when it is not active. When a TV viewer is active, it always uses a private colormap in order to produce the best possible image. If this setting is disabled, the viewer will not appear in the correct colors when it is not the active window.

The Zoom buttons allow you to enlarge the TV Viewer window. The Zoom function doubles the size of the viewer. Using Zoom to increase image size does not affect the size of the video sent by the station, so zoomed viewers will not be as clear as normal viewer windows. Zooming a viewer does not affect bandwidth usage.

The Keep on Top function ensures that other windows do not overlap the viewer window, no matter which window is active. If this setting is on, the entire viewer window will always be visible no matter where you move it on the desktop.

The INTV! Clipboard Viewer is an interface to the OpenDVE Clipboard that allows users to copy, paste, save, and print images copied from viewer windows. In addition to the main window, where the image currently in the Clipboard is placed, there are four pull-down menus: File, Edit, View, and Help.

The File menu contains controls that allow the user to Save the current image, Print the image, and Close the Clipboard Viewer.

Using Save As, the user can save the image in the Clipboard in any graphics format supported by INTV! (a list of supported graphics formats can be found in Appendix A, "Technical Issues"). When Save as is selected, a standard Motif file requester is launched, and the user can choose the path and graphics format that he or she wishes to save the image in.

The Edit menu contains controls that allow the user to Copy the current image stored in the Clipboard, Paste the current image, or Clear the Clipboard.

The View menu contains the Zoom submenu and allows the user to Refresh the Clipboard window in case the image becomes corrupted.

The Zoom submenu allows the user to view the image zoomed in to 1:8, 1:4, and 1:2, and zoomed out from 8:1, 4:1, and 2:1.

Return to MDL Home Page