Viewing Our Movies

Depending on how your computer is configured, it may try to handle the movie files on this website in a number of different ways. It can be confusing to sort out what’s going wrong if there is a problem. If you want to see the movies but are having trouble, try the following:

• Make sure you have Quicktime Player 6.x or later installed. Quicktime 5.x will not work (Help –> About Quicktime Player will tell you what version of you are running). Quicktime is available for both Macs and PCs and can be downloaded at no cost from here.
• Save the video file to your hard disk. Many multimedia programs will try to show the video right in your web browser, which is great when it works, but can be frustrating when it doesn’t. Manually downloading the file to your desktop ensures that your computer isn’t outsmarting itself. Do this by right-clicking the link to the movie (on macs control-click) and choose the option that contains as many words as possible from the following list: Save Download Linked Target File Link To Disk As…. If you are presented with a save dialog box, ensure that you save the file someplace you will be able to find it again.
• Start Quicktime Player and view the movie. Depending on how your system is configured, you may or may not be able to double-click on the video file to open it. If you aren’t able to open the movie directly, start Quicktime Player manually and open the movie from there. If the movie appears too small, view it at double size (select this option from the Movie menu).
• If nothing works and you MUST see the video, contact me and we’ll work something out.

File Formats and Compatibility

The video files on this website are MPEG4 files generated by Quicktime Pro. You should be able to view them on almost any system… with sufficient effort. On Windows and Mac systems, you can view the movies with Quicktime 6.x or later, or with RealPlayer 10.x or later. The current version of Windows Media Player (WMP9) cannot play MPEG4 files. On Linux systems you can use RealPlayer, Totem, Xine, Mplayer, and probably others (you may or may not need the Mplayer codecs).

Slow Internet Connections

You must be both patient and persistent to view these files if you connect to the internet via a telephone modem. If you need to download Quicktime 6.x, be prepared to wait one to two hours. The largest video file I’ve posted as of January 2005 should take less than twenty minutes to download. People with DSL, Cable, or other fast internet connections should have no noticeable wait at all.

Why is this so complicated?

Mostly because I’m lazy, but partly because video on the internet is a morass of lies and corporate territorialism. The last format that Microsoft, Apple, and Real all chose to support was MPEG1, which was published eleven years ago. Video compression technology has come a long way since then, but if you want to take advantage of it you need to publish your video in three formats to make it accessible. Many sites do just that, but I haven’t got the patience for it. MPEG4 is the closest thing that exists to a modern standard for low-bandwidth video, so that’s what I’m using for now.

Also partly because web browsers and media players generally suck. They fight over who gets to playback popular formats, they behave erratically when confronted with a media type they don’t know how to handle, they give incomplete/incorrect error messages, and generally do not fail in any graceful or comprehensible fashion.