Students working at computers

If you are trying to make do with a dialup Internet connection, the best procedure is to download the movies to your own computer and watch the local copies (rather than watching via the Internet). With most web browsers, you can right click a link to a movie and opt to download the file. Then you can open it with Quicktime Player and watch your local copy anytime you like. The iTunes option described in the box to the right gives another alternative for downloading movies in the background.

 

QuickTime Info

QuickTime is essential for this class because all the course content is delivered in the form of Quicktime movies.

Quicktime is software from Apple which allows you to view movies from within your web browser. It runs on Windows and Macintosh computers (but not Unix) and is free. (There is an optional $29 upgrade to a "Pro" version that has a lot of useful features. You can get the Pro version if you like, but it isn't required.) QuickTime 7.0 is the current version and is the one you will download if you go to the Apple web site. A free download is available at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/

Most web browsers allow you to watch movies within your web browser via the Quicktime plugin. This is something you can specify in your browser preferences if you know how. It's also possible to watch a movie online using Quicktime Player (which is installed when you install Quicktime). If you know the address on the Internet where the movie is located, just "open URL" under the "file" menu in Quicktime Player. For example, in your web browser you can click on the link with your right mouse button (Windows) or control-click the link (Mac) and copy the address, then paste the address into the "open URL" box in Quicktime Player for viewing with Quicktime Player. You can also set your browser preferences so that the movie file downloads and then plays with Quicktime Player, but usually this requires the entire file to download before you can start watching it.

When you view a lecture, it will look something like the picture below. (Minor differences depend on whether you are using a Macintosh or Windows computer and on which version of Quicktime you are using.)
Do You Use iTunes?

If so, then you have everything you need to watch the videos used in this class. You can subscribe to the entire set of movies and view them as podcasts within iTunes. This saves the movies to your hard drive so they're always available for immediate viewing. To import the movies into your Podcasts playlist in iTunes click the subscribe button below. (Be sure to set your iTunes preferences for podcasts to "keep all episodes.") Within iTunes you can watch the movies at whatever size you want, including full screen mode.

sample screenshot of movie

If you are viewing the movie within your browser, you don't have to wait for the whole movie to download before you can watch it. You can see how the movie download is progressing by watching the movement of the gray bar across the bottom of the window where the slider is. How fast this happens will depend of course on how fast your Internet connection is. If the slider "catches up" with the end of the gray bar, it means that you're playing the movie faster than it's downloading. (This might happen if you have a dialup connection.) When this happens the movie will stop, and you can restart it again after a little bit more of the movie has downloaded (indicated by the gray bar moving farther to the right.) A little experimenting will give you some insight into how fast your computer downloads the movies.

Click the play button to start or stop the movie. The gray bar showing behind the slider indicates that (in this picture) the whole movie has downloaded. While the movie is downloading, the portion that has not yet downloaded will appear as white rather than gray. In general , if you have a modem connection the movie will download about as fast as it plays. (If you're in a dorm with an ethernet connection, the movie will download almost instantly.)

Quicktime Trouble Shooting

Question: When I click on the link for a movie nothing happens or I get an error saying that Windows Media Player cannot open the file. What should I do?

Answer: This probably means that you do not have Quicktime installed - even if you think you do. If you are using Windows, please try the steps below. (Note: If you are on a Mac it is highly unlikely that you will
have this issue, but if you do please contact Dr. Page or Jenn for assistance.)

  1. Follow the link to Quicktime (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/) and choose "download".
  2. Under the section for the *free player* select your operating system and enter any other required information. Click the button to download. Choose to place the downloaded file (which will be called
    something like QuicktimeInstaller.exe on your desktop so that you can find it easily for the next step). This download is for the INSTALLER - not the program itself. You still have more steps to complete in order to install the program. If you stop now the program will not operate properly (this is usually where students have gone wrong if they think they have installed the program but it is still not working). This download takes only a few seconds.
  3. Go to your desktop and find the file you just downloaded. Click on it. You will be walked through the steps to install the program. This part takes a few minutes to complete. Restart your computer if it suggests that you should.
  4. Go to the course page and click a movie link to verify that it nowworks.
  5. If everything is working properly you may remove the .exe file from your desktop as it is no longer necessary.

iTunes

You can also play the movies via iTunes. So if you are a regular user of iTunes, you might like to try that. The best way to do that is to "subscribe" to the movies via the podcast subscription capabilities of iTunes. (See box at top of this page.) There are two other ways to watch movies in iTunes:

  1. Instead of clicking a link to play a movie in your browser, you can copy the link's address and open that address with iTunes (under the "Advanced" menu select "Open Stream" and paste in the address of the movie). You can then resize the corner of the iTunes window where the movie is playing so that you can see the movie at full size. When you're playing a movie this way, iTunes is playing the movie directly off the Internet.
  2. You can right click (or control click on a Mac) a link to a movie and download the movie to your own computer, then drag it into your iTunes library. So you could organize all the MA 114 movies into an iTunes playlist.

The MA 114 movies in their present format will not play on an iPod. They come in two different sizes, 640x480 pixels and 800x600 pixels. When a movie is exported for iPod, the resulting size is 320x240. Most of the 640x480 movies will export pretty well for iPod, but the 800x600 ones would result in fonts too small to read on an iPod. Eventually I'll probably make the 640x480 ones available preformatted for iPod.