Viewing and using movies
Movies on the Learning and Teaching Scotland site are provided in two formats:
Streamed Flash (FLV) movie to watch online through your browser.
This is intended for individual users who have at least a 128 Kb/s connectionMP4 format to download to your computer and then play.
This is a high quality version which provides a better quality for projecting onto large screen for presentation purposes.
Both of these formats are cross-platform which means that you can view them either on a PC or a Mac. (See Minimum system requirements.)
Movies are also provided with a transcript and in some cases the movies are captioned.
Minimum System Requirements
Operating System
PC users can use Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista with latest updates installed. Mac users can use Mac OS X 10.3 or higher.
Browser
PC users can use Internet Explorer 6.0 (or above) or Firefox 1.5 (or above). Mac users can use Safari 1.0 (or above) or Firefox 2 (or above).
Connection
A minimum connection speed of 128 Kb/s is recommended to watch the streamed movies. The movies can be viewed on slower connections but performance may be degraded.
Additional applications
To watch the Streamed movies you will need Adobe Flash Player 8.0 or above which can be downloaded for free from the Adobe Flash Player download centre.
To play the MP4 movies you will need a suitable media player such as VLC Media Player or Apple QuickTime Player (version 7 or above). These can be downloaded and installed free of charge.
Streamed Flash Movie to watch through your browser
Streamed means that the movie is sent to you in small chunks. The first chunk will start playing for you to watch, while the next chunk is being sent to you. This means you do not have to wait on the whole movie being sent before you can start to watch.
To play streamed Flash movies through your browser, you will need Adobe Flash Player 8.0 or above which can be downloaded for free from the Adobe Flash Player download centre. It is very likely that you will already have the Flash player installed on your computer since it is automatically provided with many of the more common browsers.
Playing the movie is straightforward - just click the play arrow located in the centre of the movie itself. Alternatively, you can click the smaller play arrow positioned on the left hand side of the player’s horizontal control bar.
You can also enlarge the movie to play full screen by clicking the icon positioned on the right hand side of the player’s horizontal control bar. To return to the smaller default movie size, just click the icon again. (Some browsers also allow you to press the Esc key to return to the smaller movie size.) While the movie is playing you can jump to any point by clicking on the horizontal control bar (this bar that runs along the bottom of the player.)
Quality of the streamed movie
The movie player will usually automatically play at optimum quality. It does this by detecting the bandwidth and speed of the connection you are using and playing the movie at the best quality it can for your settings.
However you can select the quality yourself. You can select the movie quality by accessing the Flash Player menu. If you have a PC, this menu can be accessed by right clicking anywhere on the movie or the player’s control bar. If you have a Mac, you can access the menu by selecting Ctrl + single mouse click. The quality options are - Best, High, Medium or Low. The setting the player is currently using is indicated by a '+' sign beside the level being used.
Problems
If you find the movie stops or stutters when you are watching it, try reducing the quality you are watching at. This may reduce the problem.
If you experience difficulty playing a movie, this may be due to your connection speed. Please bear in mind that if your connection speed is less than 128 Kb/s, we suggest that you try playing movies on another system with a connection speed at least equal to 128 Kb/s.
MP4 format movies to download
The MP4 format movie is a high quality version which generally provides a better quality picture than the online streamed Flash version particularly for projecting onto large screen for presentation purposes.
You can download the movie by selecting the movie title link next to Video download, positioned immediately under the Transcript link. Doing this lets you save the MPEG-4 download movie to a location of your choice on your computer or lets you download the movie to play in your default movie player (which should be set to Apple QuickTime Player).
You can also use the Flash player menu. If you have a PC, this menu can be accessed by right clicking anywhere on the movie or the player’s control bar. If you have a Mac, you can access the menu by selecting Ctrl + single mouse click.
To play downloaded MPEG-4 movies, you will need a suitable media player such as VLC Media Player or Apple QuickTime Player (version 7 or above). VLC Player is available as a free download for PC, Mac and Linux platforms. Apple Quicktime Player is already shipped as part of the Mac OS and PC users can download and install free of charge from the Apple QuickTime site.
Several movies on this site have long durations and consequently have large file sizes. This means that the download times for large movies will be significant if you happen to have a slow connection. The download dialogue box on your system will indicate the size of file and estimated time for the download.
To create a link, enter suitable link text on the presentation, such as 'Play the movie', highlight the text, then select Hyperlink option from the Insert menu and navigate to the MP4 file on your computer.
Note that it is best to keep the presentation and the movie in the same folder on your computer, and keep them together if you move them to other computers, otherwise the link in the PowerPoint may not work.