[gui-talk] Yesterday's announcement from the RFB&D

[David Andrews]

Hi:

Some of your thoughts about DAISY books, why they are the way they 
are etc. are possibly logical, but wrong.

NLS does not put in less navigation levels then RFB&D because it 
takes up more space.  It takes a trivial amount of space, when 
compared to the whole book.  They put in less partly because most of 
the books they read have little navigation info, and people read them 
straight through.  Remember the nav points reflect something in a 
book chapter, section, sub-section etc.

the main difference in NLS and RFB&D books, size wise is because they 
use different codec's.  This is the software that compresses the 
audio of the reading of the book, so it takes less space.  RFB&D uses 
MP3 files, and NLS uses 3GP files produced by the AMRWB Plus 
codec.  These files are about half the size of MP3 files for the same 
quality.

However, AMR Wideband Plus isn't as widely used.

Finally a .zip file is actually an archive, that is it compresses a 
group of files, and combines them under one file name.  NLS uses it 
for convenience, it keeps all the files together under one file 
name.  You download it and unzip it to extract the individual files.

I don't exactly know how RFB&D is distributing its files, since I 
haven't used new service yet, but whether or not they are zipped, one 
of their books contains the same kinds of files as does a NLS book, 
compressed audio, structure files, and .smil files linking structure and audio.

Dave

At 08:47 PM 5/1/2009, you wrote:
>I guess because of 2 reasons:
>
>Firstly NLS doesn't provide navigations on that many levels as RFB&D 
>does. NLS saves space in that process.
>Secondly, many people will still use RFBD books on their CD players 
>which is not the case with NLS books. To be able to put RFBD books 
>on to CD's they have no option except dividing large books in to several books.
>
>They can follow your suggestion and make the entire book as single 
>zip file as in the case of NLS books, in that case they will have to 
>make 2 different versions of the book available: 1 for CD users and 
>other for non-CD, VR Stream etc users.
>
>I myself second this approach.
>
>Regards
>----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Roderick" <rickrod at insightbb.com>
>To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
>Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 7:12 PM
>Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Yesterday's announcement from the RFB&D
>
>
>>I wonder why they don't use the NLS system.
>>
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