| Capability
| Rating
|
| Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in
| Fair.
|
| Interactive sound design capabilities
| Excellent. Technology is designed to compress multimedia files as well as create them with advanced Lingo scripting.
Advanced button rollovers, transitions, sound effects, loops, audio synced to animation, scriptable fade-ins and fade-outs, and more.
|
| Software cost for encoding and streaming
| $900+.
Must purchase Director to export Shockwave files. Format does not require dedicated server.
|
| Level of documentation and support
| Good.
|
| Audio encoding and content generation
| Easy.
|
| Audio authoring and delivery
| Hard.
Director is a powerful multimedia authoring environment that takes time to master.
|
| Audio fidelity and compression
| Excellent.
Shockwave audio files compressed with the MPEG codec in Director sound great.
|
| Low-bandwidth performance
| Poor.
Shockwave files often drop out if a user's bandwidth fluctuates. Shockwave and Flash audio streaming works best for users with 56 Kbps or DSL modem speeds.
|
| Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming
| Poor/Fair -- HTTP Pseudo-Streaming.
The Director Shockwave format does not support large-scale broadcasting. |