Steve wrote:
> Was the Steve you mentioned in this email, myself?

No, I meant Steve Clunn, who has been making videotapes of his EV
conversions. He sent me one of his CD-ROMs that a friend made for him. I
had a great deal of trouble viewing it.

> I'd be interested in knowing what problems you had viewing the video.
> Was it just a bandwidth issue or are you having problems downloading
> the file to watch locally or is the problem with actually playing the
> files locally?

There are three EV conversion videos on the CD-ROM, each about 30-40
megabytes in size. They are in Microsoft .WMV file format, but curiously
display a "Quicktime" icon on my desktop.

I tried running them with Windows 98se on my 233 MHz Mac PowerPC with
the Virtual PC emulator. This normally performs about like a 100 MHz
Pentium PC. I've used this setup to successfully view quite a number of
Microsoft and Quicktime video files, and my son routinely uses it to
play PC computer games that don't require the ultimate in speed.

Attempting to view Steve Clunn's files popped up a message that I had to
download a different player and codec from Microsoft, which I did. The
files then ran v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. The audio was badly chopped up
(about 50/50 audio/silence). The video was extremely grainy, and only
displayed about 1 frame per 10 seconds, and was drastically out of sync
with the audio. Since Steve's narration has lots of "measure here..."
and "this is...", the audio is useless without the video synced to it.

To make sure it wasn't a speed problem reading from the CD-ROM, I copied
the files to hard drive, and then to a RAM disk. No difference.

> I can certainly produce a wide variety of video formats, if that's the
> problem, with either the tools I have here or with ones I can download
> off the net.  Just let me know which formats people want to see.
> 
> As far as VHS is concerned, I have the tools to write the digital video
> to a VCR and could produce VHS tapes for those interested.  I can also
> write CD-R and VCD for those of you interested in those media.

You should certainly talk to Steve Clunn directly. The computer "guru"
he's got doesn't know what he's doing. Steve wants these videos to be
viewable by as many people as possible, which (to me) means it should be
on VHS videotape format. But it would also be nice to have a
downloadable or online-viewable version for those who prefer it.
-- 
Lee A. Hart                Ring the bells that still can ring
814 8th Ave. N.            Forget your perfect offering
Sartell, MN 56377 USA      There is a crack in everything
leeahart_at_earthlink.net  That's how the light gets in - Leonard Cohen

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