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

[Peter Donahue]

Hello Dave and listers,

    I was reading the description of the RFB&D download facility earlier 
this morning. They have an unpack utility you must download and install in 
order to unzip their books. This unpack tool is similar to the one formerly 
used by Bookshare.org. Each CD in a title is saved in its own folder in the 
main download folder created when the download tool is unpacked.

Peter Donahue


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 03, 2009 1:40 PM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Yesterday's announcement from the RFB&D


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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