CompuServe Messages

Chris– You're asking a complicated question. Harry Hallman mentioned CD-I, which you should consider if you need low-cost delivery machines (CD-I players output to TV monitors, and the players with FMV boards are slated to ship in August for about $850 list price). CD-I development is expensive, however, and there's only one authoring tool (MediaMogul) that doesn't require C language programming. Expect to pay $45K – $55K for a development system that includes the CD-I disc emulator and a CD-R drive (a write-once drive for making your own CD-I disks), not to mention a fee of $500 per finished minute to compress your FMV segments. Another option is to look at the CD-ROM disc as a huge read-only hard disk. You can then use any multimedia authoring software to develop interactive training with the elements you want (FMV, graphics, etc.) and pay a CD-ROM service center to put it all on disc for you (or buy a CD-R drive for $5K – $8K and make the discs yourself). This means, of course, that your students must have computers equipped with the necessary multimedia hardware to handle sound, video, etc. You may also have to pay a run-time fee for the "playback" part of the authoring software. An authoring tool like Microsoft's Multimedia Viewer is less sophisticated that a dedicated authoring system like IconAuthor or Authorware, but it has some elements specifically designed to handle retrieval of large quantities of information from a CD-ROM. BTW, I do consulting on multimedia as well as custom development. Send me a note via CISMail if you're interested. Jim Kauffman / Lehigh Interactive Multimedia