Authoring an Enhancement Stream

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

The functionality and form of the stream authoring tool depends on your user's needs. For example, novice users might prefer a tool that automatically generates an enhancement stream from a wizard, whereas advanced users might require an editor that enables them to directly edit the stream.

Although you have great flexibility in how you write and design your authoring tool, there are certain common steps to creating, testing, and transmitting an enhancement stream.

The following topics describe, in order, the tasks involved in authoring an enhancement stream:

1. Create a new enhancement stream or open an existing stream.
2. Add events to the stream.
3. Create announcement files
4. Allocate available bandwidth.
5. Edit and delete events in the stream.
6. Validate the syntax of the stream language statements.
7. Convert the stream to low-level syntax.
8. Save the stream to disk.
9. Test the stream.
10. Transmit the stream.

Note that the last two steps are not strictly part of an enhancement stream editor. They are, however, necessary functionality for your user. You can implement these tasks into a stream editing tool or a separate application.