Media

Other Tech Tips... General Prep, Media, PowerPoint, FAQ's, Class prep

Previewing vs downloading

Previewing eClips files allows you to decide what files are appropriate. In some cases they may be the lower quality files… For that reason we created the downloadable files. They will give you our best quality for projected playback. In some cases they could take a moment to download but once you have them they are available on your computer… lecture after lecture. There is no need to re-download clips.
Students however will be limited to viewing the “preview” versions.
Video and your computer- media players

Computers these days are more than equipped to run video. They do rely on the media player to know what to do with a file. With that in mind, having the latest media player will ensure that you never get an unknown file type or missing codec error.

If you have an older computer you may find video playback “sluggish” or “stuttery”. In this case it could be several factors. Your hard drive is excessively full or you have many processes running in the system tray (bottom right of a PC). Some inexpensive laptops and especially older laptops have very slow hard drives and CDRom drives, having the hard drive filled with video won’t help. Smooth video playback may be impossible in these cases.
Video will almost always play back better from the hard drive versus a CDRom or USB removable drive (both may work fine depending on the speed of the CDRom or the quality of the removable drive). Be sure to test your playback on the computer most likely to be the presentation computer.
Lastly, projected playback can be tricky. Projectors require a certain amount of resources from your laptop. If you have a lower end laptop or lower end video card in a reasonable laptop… you may find that you can play video on the laptop screen but not on the projector. In this case try using only the projector to view from,* this will minimize the draw on the video resources of the computer.

*this feature is usually accessed through the “function” button and the “F#’s” at the top of the PC laptop. Often there is a LCD/CRT label in blue. This toggles the screen output of the laptop from LCD (laptop) to CRT (projector) to both. It is this “both” feature that can overwhelm an older or lower end laptop.
Choosing video format

We produce MPEG 1 files and WMV files. While PC’s can playback MPEG 1 files they don’t always work within PowerPoint. This may be due to media player wars. Media players “take over” file types and play them as their own. In some cases QuickTime takes the ability to play MPEG files. This will prevent PowerPoint from accessing these files during presentation.

We have increased the quality of our WMV files to be nearly the quality of MPEG 1 but will always play in PowerPoint on a PC.

PC’s that do not meet the minimum requirements of Window Media Player 9 may have trouble playing back in PowerPoint or in Windows Media Player.

“Unknown file type” and “codec not found” are usually indications of an out of date media player. Real Player will playback all the files we create but will not work in PowerPoint reliably. Therefore make sure you have the latest version of Windows Media Player.

Apple computers running PowerPoint will need to have a fairly recent version of quicktime player. Because the MPEG 1 codec has been around for some time there is not as urgent a need to have the latest version.
Finding your downloads

Different Web Browsers download to different spots. PC’s using Internet Explorer will give you the option to choose where you would like to download.

Mozilla and Netscape both have preset locations that can be defined in their respective “Tools/Options”. By default they are set to the desktop.

Mac’s usually download to the desktop as well. Both Internet Explorer and Safari have options to change location in “preferences”.