Network Videos - how about a no picture option?

Either no picture, or a very tiny picture.

Right now I'm *listening* to the show called Heroes, but I'm not
watching it. It would be nice to be able to turn-off the picture, or
minimize it to very small, to avoid wasting bandwidth on the Video data
that I'm not watching.

Tom P....

This may surprise you but the audio takes up much more than the video.
I make wedding videos for people and the m2v2 (mpeg2 video file) will
be 700 meg but the wav file will be 1.6gig.

videonovels...

That's because a MPEG2 video is compressed. A WAV audio is not
compressed. Convert it to a MP3-compression, and it should shrink to
around 100-150 meg. (Vice-versa, uncompress the MPEG2 to a WAV-type
format, and it will be ~50 gigabytes.)

Still not convinced?

Pop a DVD into your computer and play it. If you're using PowerDVD or
similar, it will have an option to "display stats". The audio stream
is recorded in kilobytes per second. The video stream is in megabytes
per second. In other words, the video data is taking up more room.

I can get concrete examples when I get home but it's much much bigger.
Mostly from the fact that video can compress quite well (pleny of
repeat of near repeat patterens to build a dictionary from), audio
doesn't compress almost at all in the conventional sense (try to WinZip
a wav, even a silent one, and you'll see what I mean). With audio you
have to do psychoacustical tricks to make you "think" you're listening
to the same thing... but it's not.

videonovels...

MPEG2 does the same thing as MP3... squashes the video by throwing away
data.

Tom P.

Anybody...

How about a no picture and no sound version? Extremely cheap to make,
and they could still charge you $200 per download. ;-)

glassman...

It's called R A D I O.....

telenovels...

Huh. So where can I find "R A D I O" versions of Heroes, Jericho,
Justice for streaming to my computer? All I need is the audio portion.

Oh that's right; they don't exist.

So back to my original point----- I wish nbc.com, abc.com, etc would
allow us to turn off the video portion of the stream and/or shrink it
to very small, so as to minimize the wasted bandwidth of a picture I'm
not watching.

pkj0891...

Two suggestions:

1) Write to Sony and tell them to bring back the Watchman. When I
tote mine out during power outages, it has a button to turn off the
video to conserve power.

2)Stay in the Philly metro area and listen to ABC TV shows that are
broadcast on the very bottom of the FM dial. The signal reaches all
the way to Reading, so it might hit Lancaster.

Okay, I'm not being helpful, but I get your point . Problem is, no
one cares. Hell, I have XM Radio, and I've never listened to Sonic
Theater, or whatever it's called, for more than about 10 minutes.
Only people who live in their cars or live for books on tape care
about listening to TV on the radio. For 99.9% of the population, it's
a nonstarter.

SCIFI.com has an option where the picture is "blurred" to reduce
bandwidth to squeeze into a 50K dialup. NBC.com, etcetera ought to be
able to do that same with their video.