I mentioned this on another thread, but the video files were encoded incorrectly. A 3 min video encoded to stream at 56k should not be 16mb!

Example, I encoded a little goofy film my friends and i threw together (its really stupid, but for the sake of explaining this) in Windows Media to stream at 56k and it was about 2 megs and 10 min long.

http://capnfggt.tripod.com/cf56kwm.ASX

The video quality is lousy but thats what you get when you stream at that low of a quality.

The quality is pretty good on the NPGMC movies, but if they wanted to offer then at that high of a bitrate they should have just made them available for download, because they are nearly impossible to stream.

If they'd make 'em available for download maybe Mac folks could see them, too. So far I've been unable to get them to work at all in OS X.

And I know, I know...it's easy to say "get a PC" or whatever...but if there were problems with platform-specific files on the site you should know about it before joining.

Doozer said:

There is a version of Windows Media Player for the Mac isnt there?

I think OS9 will play Windows Media 7 but I heard OSX wont play Windows Media 9 in some cases.

If you have some kind of video editing software it may be able to convert the files for you.

WMP for mac is at v7.1 while on windows it's at v9. And of the 4 videos on the site, only 2 are listed as having v7.1 versions available. And of those, neither of them work on the Mac. So in theory, the videos should be playable on the Mac. In reality, it doesn't work. As I posted on the Mac thread, the videos should have been MPEG4 files, which, being an industry standard, work just fine on both platforms.

alandail said:

divx is basically a hacked version of Windows media and there are divx players for Mac. If there is a way you can change the file type from ".wmv" to ".avi" you may be able to open it that way with a DivX player. Just a thought.

I'm sure I could convert the video files to something I could play using the full version of Quicktime or even Final Cut Pro, but my problem lies in just getting the file to load at all.

Doozer said:

i finally got the files to load...i just opened them in one browser, left it alone & did my normal stuff in another browser...finally i heard the video start playing..

buffering time is very long..but they should eventually play...

i saw most of them this morning...very cool stuff...

rio said:

rio --

Are you on a Mac, and if so, what OS are you running?