Sometimes web server is overloaded and does not supply the files in time resulting in this error. We recommend that you download the zip files and play it locally.
We offer each presentation in the following formats:
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 800X400 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, Windows 98, NT 4, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.
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.
RealMedia Player: Ideally, you need RealMedia Player (or Real One player). It is available from http://www.real.com/player/index.html. The free version is sufficient. Plus version is not required.
If you have RealMedia Player Version 5, it will not be able to handle SMIL files. Please download a newer version.
The downloaded versions of the presentations also use SMIL and so you will need RealMedia Player to play locally.
You can also use Real Alternative available free from http://codecguide.com/about_real.htm
The video requires a stable 28.8 kbps connection. While the audio requires a stable 9.6 kbps. We have found that even if you have a 56 kbps connection to your internet service provider, the net bandwidth between your computer and our server may sometimes be less than 28.8 kbps. RealMedia player is designed to overcome temporary reduction in bandwidth but will give up if the available bandwidth is low for a long time.
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. Real Media player is designed to skip video frames if the CPU cannot keep up with the demand. That is why we recommend CPU power equivalent to 166 MHz Pentium or better.
You may not have a good network connection. Whenever packets are lost, RealMedia replays 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. For local playback, you will need RealPlayer.
Make sure that no other programs are running on the system when you are trying to view video. RealMedia is quite adaptive to available capacity and so it responds by reducing the quality if the load on your system is high.
The most likely cause is the network congestion. A high packet loss rate or extremely long delays will require RealMedia player to continuously rebuffer and resynchronize resulting in the interruption.
Make sure that your display screen size is 800X600 or larger. Both the video and the slides cannot fit on 640X480 or smaller screens.
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.
You can also use free email service like maildown.com to get the large realmedia files by email. We recommend that you use email method only if your email server is closer to your computer than our server. Otherwise, getting large emails in remote mail servers will not be any faster than downloading it directly from our server. For example, if you live outside of USA and use a hotmail or yahoo address, getting it from these servers will not be any faster. However, if you have an email address in your own organization or country, the email will take time to get there but you will be able to get the files right away once they are there.
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.
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