| Video |
Video clips on the web. I hope you can watch these bowling videos ok, but if you are having trouble or want to improve the performance of your PC these tips should help you.
| Sadly we are still in the stone-ages when it comes to video over the web. Even an expensive corporate "T1" dedicated connection to the internet is still slower than all but the earliest of CD-Rom players. Broadcast video comes into your TV at 10MB per second, every second. At those data-rates it would take the average PC 56k modem more than half an hour to download a one second clip (yawn!). | So, until we all get next-generation "fat-pipe" connections to the Internet we have to contend with slow downloads and high degrees of compression to bring these videos to you. Streaming video does, however, try to reduce the download time, but the data-rates are so low that the videos are tiny and quality is poor. So I've converted them from the bloated "AVI" format to compressed "MPEG" videos, which is roughly equivalent in quality to VHS tape. |
All that extra work means you may encounter problems: below you'll find some troubleshooting tips and ways you can make the video look better.
Probably the simplest thing to do is to save the clips to your own PC: put your mouse pointer over the video clip, right-click the mouse button and choose the "Save As.." option. You can then double click on the video file and watch it while you are not connected to the Internet, and without the download wait. This also gives you the option to "zoom" in, again use the mouse right-click to get the Media-Player drop down menu and choose the "zoom" option, or just drag the corner of the window to enlarge it.
| Make sure your screen is setup ok,
"True Color" (32-bit) or 65,536 (16-bit) colors
works best - at only 256 colors (8-bit) the videos will
look awful. Screen Size: depending on the size of your monitor the more resolution you can get the better. On a 15" monitor 800x600 is probably about right, but if you have a 17" monitor use 1024/768 and on 19" or higher 1280x1024 will increase your viewing pleasure and you'll never want to go back to the postage-stamp size screens. I have seen problems, though, if you try and use a resolution too high for your video driver. Refresh rate: the more the better. if you sit in front of a screen for a long time with a low refresh rate the flicker will give you a headache. Use as high a refresh rate (minimum of 75hz) as you can get from your video driver. |
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Check the "gamma" of your monitor by adjusting the brightness and contrast. I have dark backgrounds on this site, I don't like bland black-and-white web sites but if your screen is not setup right it could look very dark. Make sure your PC is up to the job - I've run these clips successfully on a Pentium 75mhz machine, though you really need a little faster machine for best results Get the latest media player; see the Microsoft site |
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For Windows users the Display
Properties menu (shown to the right) can be used
to change your screen setup: use the right-click
on your mouse and choose the "Properties"
option to get this menu.