Streaming Media: Advanced Script Indexer

Microsoft Advanced Script Indexer 

The Advanced Script Indexer is a utility that lets you embed index markers, captioning commands, and slide show commands to your Windows Media file, along with letting you make adjustments to the Title, Author, Description, Rating, and Copyright fields in that file. It has been replaced, with the advent of Windows Media 9 by the Windows Media File Editor , a utility that gets downloaded with the current shipping version of the Windows Media Encoder . This documentation is posted here for backwards compatibility only. 

Note: The instructions on this page presuppose that you are using our home-grown MediaFileThingy utility to generate an embedded player on a web page.

Before you begin using the Advanced Script Indexer, you should already have encoded your Windows Media file.  (Presumably, you will want to encode the file with the version of the Windows Media Encoder that matches the file version of the Advanced Script Indexer, and not the new release of the Encoder--see the Windows Media Encoder help file on this site.) Once you've encoded your media file, begin by launching the Advanced Script Indexer and opening your file.

When your file is opened, you'll see the following display:

On the left side of the screen, you'll see the attributes of your media file, and you have the option to change the information concerning the file's Title, Author, Description, Rating, and Copyright . With the exception of the Rating field, all of these fields are required for any media file on Plattsburgh's Media Server.  Make sure that the information there is correct.

On the upper right side of the screen, you'll see a media player, player controls, and a timeline; beneath the player, there are two windows, the upper of which is marked with Marker Time , and the lower of which is marked Script Time . 

Adding "Markers" (Index points)

The insertion of markers (or index points) in your audio or video files allows users of your file to automatically advance to specific portions of your file.  A long clip might well contain a number of these index markers; a short clip need not contain any.  Ideally, you should consider that the indexing of your file with markers is a courtesy to the file's users, who may benefit from being provided the means of quickly advancing to a particular section of the audio/video content.

To add a marker, press the playback button on the media player, and pause the playback at the point at which you'd like your marker to appear. Then right-click over the window containing the Marker Time heading. A menu will appear, the topmost option of which will be Add . Click on this option.

When you've clicked on the Add menu item over the Marker Time area, a dialog window will open up allowin you to specify the name of your index marker. By default, the time will be set to the time at which the media player was paused.  All you should need to set, here, is the name of your marker in the Name field--this name should reflect the nature of the content that begins at the time specified in the Time field.

You can repeat these steps--playing, pausing, and inserting a new index marker--as often as you'd like.  Each new addition of an index point will appear in the Marker window.

Subsequently, you can edit any marker by double-clicking on it, and you can delete any given marker by right-clicking on it and selecting the Delete option that appears in the popup menu.

Adding Captioning and/or Slide Show Commands

Captioning and slide show commands are added in the same way as index markers are added, except that instead of right-clicking in the Marker window to invoke the menu, you'll be right-clicking in the Script Command window.

To begin, press the Play button on the media player, and click the Pause button at the point where you'd like your command to be inserted. Then right-click in the Script Command window to invoke a popup menu that allows you to Add a new command:

Selecting Add from the menu brings up a dialog window that indicates the playback time at which the command will be invoked, a field in which you can specify the Type of command (you'll want TEXT for closed captioning text and URL for slideshow links), and a Parameter field that will contain the captioning text or the URL for the slideshow link.

Captioning

To add a closed captioning text, select TEXT as the script type. In the Parameter field, enter the closed captioning text that should begin at the playback time indicated in the Time field.

Tip: unless otherwise specified any item of closed-captioning text will remain on the end-user's screen until a new item replaces it; to clear this text at a specified time, play the file to the point that you'd like the captioning to disappear, and then create a TEXT script command with a parameter of CLEAR.

Slide Show

A "slide show" is created by triggering the appearance of web pages from the playback stream of the audio file. Every time a URL script command is encountered when the audio file is played, the web page specified in the Parameter field will be loaded.

To create a slide-show script command, play back the audio file to the point where you'd like the new web page to be invoked, right-click over the script commands area, select Add , and set the script Type field to URL . In the Parameter window, enter the name of the web page that you would like to appear at the playback time specified in the Time field.

The same file can contain numerous (and mixed) captioning (TEXT ) and slide-show (URL ) commands; as each new one is added, it will appear in the script commands window:

To edit any one of these commands, double-click on the command.  To delete any of these commands, right-click on it, and select Delete from the pop-up menu.

Saving the File

Once you've finished adding your marker and script commands, you should be sure to save your file.  When you save the file, your marker and script commands will be embedded into the file, and you'll be ready to move on to the process of moving your file to the media server and creating the web pages that will contain your media file--all this is relatively quickly done using the MediaFileThingy .