The following guidelines are based on what we have tried. If you have successfully tried on systems not listed here, please let us know and we will add that information here.
Hardware: You need a high-end PC with a sound card and a video card capable of displaying 1024X768 screen with high color (16-bit). We have tested in on 166 MHz Pentium. The quality suffers significantly on lower speed systems. See later questions on audio/video quality.
We have not tried MACs or Unix Workstations.
Operating System: We have tested it with Windows 95 and later.
Browser: We have tested it with Firefox Version 2 and up, Netscape Version 4 and up and Internet Explorer Version 4 and up. We don't know whether it will work with older versions of these browsers or other browsers.
The videos require a stable 200 kbps connection.
Please make sure that your screen is set to high color (16-bit) or better. If the number of colors is less, say, 256, the picture will look extremely bad. You can check the number of colors by right-clicking on any blank part of your screen and selecting properties or in control panel display settings.
If the picture is good but the motion is poor, then you need a faster CPU. Video requires considerable CPU power.
You may not have a good network connection. Whenever packets are lost, media players replay the old syllable. That is why, you may hear, "tha..tha..tha.." when the speaker is trying to say, "That."
Make sure that you use the highest powered CPU with the latest operating system and the best network connection. You can download the audio/video files or even get them by email and play locally. This will avoid the network problems. However, we recommend that you try to view/hear some part of the audio/video to make sure that you have the correct hardware and software.
Make sure that no other programs are running on the system when you are trying to view video.
The most likely cause is the network congestion. A high packet loss rate or extremely long delays will require your media player to continuously rebuffer and resynchronize resulting in the interruption.
Make sure that your display screen size is 1024X768 or larger.
Frankly, we don't know. We found that video files start almost within a minute. While the audio files, at least on the older server, take several minutes to start. In some cases, we had to wait as much as 15 minutes. They do eventually start and so don't give up. Do something useful in the mean time. Or try audio on our new server.
Right-click on "Slides+Audio" or "Slides+Video" and select "save target as" from the pop-up menu.
Yes, all information on our web site is copyrighted. You cannot reproduce, copy, or distribute it without our prior permission. In particular, it is illegal to make a copy of any of our web page available on your web site. You can freely link to any page on our web site. You do not need our permission to do so.
If you will be interested in hosting a publicly accessible freely available mirror of our audio/video recordings, please let us know and we will make arrangements to help prepare pages. You will need a high-quality server, a high-bandwidth connection, and a lot of disk space.
This will help others in your part of the world to access the lectures faster.