Part 1 (4:20 mins.) with
JPEG Images (3.5 MB) or
GIF Images (5.4 MB)
The current release is version 0.3 (April 12, 1995).
Illustrated Audio is a technology developed at the Communications Research Centre, in collaboration with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), that is designed to synchronize image and text displays with a sound track. This allows for computer-based slide shows and for distributing video programs over low-bandwidth networks where full-motion video is not possible. When working with video material, an author using Illustrated Audio can pick key frames to illustrate and augment the sound track, and avoid the problems of random frames seen with slow-scan or reduced frame rate systems.
Illustrated Audio data files (usually with the file extension .ia) consist of an audio track, various image and text files, and a script that provides instructions for display and synchronization. The parts are assembled into a "tar" archive for distribution.
To use Illustrated Audio files, you will need two programs. The iaunpack program is a Bourne shell script that unpacks the data file and launches the player. The iaplay program is the player that synchonizes the images with the sound track. The distributions are gzip'ed and tar'ed.
We provide several distributions. Currently the Illustrated Audio system requires that you have a UNIX computer running the X windows system and have audio capability. You should probably get the source code for these programs but we also have binary distributions for Sun SPARCstations (SunOS 4.1.x / Solaris 2.x) as well as for Linux (slackware 2.0.0 distribution) systems. You may also need a copy of the IJG JPEG Library (version 5a or later) to build the system.
These programs are freely distributable, and we encourage you to make suggestions and improvements. We are also looking for people interested in porting the programs to other platforms.
Our first example of Illustrated Audio is taken from a CBC TV news
program in Ottawa called "NewsDay". In this story, reporter Tom New
examines the National Capital FreeNet, the Internet, and the legal and
social issues of computer networks.
The three parts to this story are available with either GIF or JPEG images (to support older versions of Illustrated Audio and to give smaller files for version 0.3).
Part 1 (4:20 mins.) with
JPEG Images (3.5 MB) or
GIF Images (5.4 MB)
Part 2 (4:05 mins.) with
JPEG Images (3.5 MB) or
GIF Images (4.6 MB)
Part 3 (3:32 mins.) with
JPEG Images (2.8 MB) or
GIF Images (3.5 MB)
audio/x-illustrated; iaunpack %sThis assumes that iaunpack and iaplay have been installed in your path. Here is a small test file to test your configuration (time = 0:08, size = 56 KB). You need to do this before you select these files with Mosaic/Netscape.