To gain greater mastery of the computer skills demonstrated in these Web Video broadcasts, you must open a second Netscape window, a practice window. Watch the tutorial videoclip demonstrations in one window and then carry them out in your other practice window. You can have both windows open at the same time and click from one to the next quickly.
Click on a link phrase (underlined in blue or purple) to see and hear a demonstration. After you have completed the TV show, click the back arrow to choose another.
These videoclip files are very short movies a megabyte or two in size. This means that if you are using a high speed university connection, these demonstration files will play after a few seconds. If you are using a modem and have a transmission speed around 4000 bytes (4K) per second, it may take you several minutes to receive each demonstration. If you find that transmission speeds are too slow and it is taking too long, click the stop button in Netscape's menu bar and return to the case study narrative. Try the works again later when transmissions speeds may have increased again. Because of the current slow nature of modem communication, a CD ROM version of the broadcasts is also in development.
You can greatly speed up the time it takes for a movie to play. If you have Netscape 3.0 or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later versions, and have a version of Quicktime which is 2.5 or later, the movie can play almost immediately. With these applications installed, as soon as you seen the first frame of your video, you can click the play button, a small triangle shape in the movie controller bar at the bottom of the video image. It will play while the rest of the movie is downloading to your computer workstation.
Windows and Macintosh Operating Systems
The video clips run fine in a Mac environment. In a Windows environment, we have not found a plug-in that will play them properly. That is, the video and mouse clicks come through, but the narration does not. However, you can download the movie by clicking on it and use a movie player. Photoshop 6.0 for Windows does play them just fine.
Special Feature Additions, If Necessary
In order to use the demonstration movies, you may have to add special features called plug-ins to your browser. Try one of the videos first, and if the movie plays once it is downloaded, you need do nothing further. Just continue viewing.
If however you do not see a video clip demonstration, you must make some choices depending on the browser you use and its version number. Two browsers will be described here, Netscape and Internet Explorer. But no matter which browser you use on which OS, Mac or Windows, for the best playability, use the latest version of Apple's video player code, Quicktime. As of this writing, the most current version is Quicktime 2.5. Check Apple's Quicktime site for the version for either platform and relevant Plug-ins. There is a significant improvement between older versions and Quicktime 2.5.
Netscape Options
To download a file is to move a copy of it from a remote computer to your desktop computer. Many Internet users have either Netscape 2.x or 3.x. Different plug-ins must be downloaded for each version.
Netscape version 2.x
If you are using Netscape version 2.0 or some later 2.x version, you need to download the plug-in and place it in the plug-in folder found with the Netscape 2.0 folder.
Again, do NOT do this unless you have a problem with the movie display in the first place.
Movie Display
In our Instructional Technology Center, the display works best on computers with Multiple Scan Displays, which in this lab are found on the PowerMac series computers 7500 and 8500. Set these monitors to display at the size of 832-624.
The demonstration movies will display on monitors of any size, but on standard displays you may have to do more scrolling up and down and left and right to potentially see everything happening on the computers screens in the movie.
To reduce the amount of scrolling you may need to do, turn off the menu bars on the top of your browser's screen. The commands in Netscape to do this are found under the options command in the menu bar at the top of your screen. To turn them off, that is to remove the checkmark in front of them which indicates they are active, click to drag to each of them in turn until the checkmarks are gone: Show Toolbar, Show Location, and Show Directory Buttons. Turn these features on and off as you need them.
At the bottom of each movie display is a Control Bar with a slider. Use this slider to re-play this movie from any point by dragging the slider left or right and then clicking the triangle in the left of this control bar. To stop the movie, click once. To restart, double-click. Use the scroll bars on the right of screen to scroll down to the Control Bar to restart from any part which you need to see again and again.