ehsgurp
01-22-2003, 12:02 PM
Here is my situation. We are developing a web interface for a county court that will allow for the storage and retreival of propriatary format audio files of court cases. The format is irrelevant, but if it helps, it is in the "For The Record (FTR)" audio format within a 4 channel WAV file (more info: www.ftr.org). Their system records audio in continuous 5 minute increments and saves the audio to these formats. The player that is used to play these audio files (FTR Player Plus - Free Download) from a local drive or cd, automatically recognizes that if there are 10 files in the folder, that the audio is 50 minutes in length and plays all 50 minutes continuously, without the user having to keep selecting the next 5 minute file. This court is wanting to have us put these files on the Internet (with all appropriate security, of course) for archiving and retreival. We have already developed a system that lists all files stored on the server for retreival by the client. The problem is that if the user click on a file to download, then obviously they only get that file's 5 minutes worth of audio. The user would have to download all the files (which can be 50 - 500 MB in size) to thier drive to play the audio. Also, there is no way to set this FTR player up to look at an FTP site to retreive the audio. I would like to find out some opionions on how to best get the full audio to the users. In a perfect world, I would like to find some way to have the files automatically combined, when requested (not beforehand or manually), into a full length audio stream and have the audio streamed to the users as they listen to it. I would also like to find out if anyone has used server size ZIP compression to reduce the storage space used, or if anyone has used the client/server ZIP method to reduce the files upon upload/download. We have to do all of this automation on the server; We can not ask the court to modify, ZIP or join the files before upload. The server will only be allowed hold the 5 minute increment files. Also, the end users of these files are VERY non-technical and they can not be asked to do anything other than click a button (in other words, they can't even unzip a file). All opionions are appreciated, even the bizzare ones!