Web videos, like most things on the web can be viewed in many different ways depending on personal choice, your system setup, operating system, etc. I certainly won't attempt to explain all of the possible variations (not that I could if I wanted to!) I will try to provide an overview that will hopefully get you started, or at least get you to the point that somehow, some way, you can see my videos.

First of all, videos can either be embedded in a page, or exist as a separate link. I usually do both, since some browsers don't handle embedded video. If your browser does handle embedded video, you're in luck, just sit back and watch. However, if you want to save the video to your hard disk, you can use the link to do that by right clicking on the link and choosing either "Save target as..." if you use Internet Explorer or "Save link as..." for Netscape Navigator. Incidentally, if you use NN, you'll need to download a plug in to view some of my movies, since some of them are encoded as Windows Media. You can find the plug-in here: look under "Windows Media Tools and Services". As far as plug-ins go, you might also need the Quicktime plug-in which can be downloaded here.

While you're watching embedded video (or downloaded video, for that matter), you'll see the opening title of the video, the control buttons, and a line with a box in it (see diagram). If you're using something other than Windows Media Player, your display will look a little different, but there will probably be some type of timeline that shows where you are in the video and how much has downloaded (some versions of RealPlayer are a notable exception to this). The line with the box in it is the timeline. It will be partly gray and partly white. The white area indicated how much of th video has been loaded, and the gray shows how much is still left to load. You can start playing the video whenever you want, but if the little box (which shows your position in the video) catches up to the gray area, the video will stutter or stop. If your connection speed is faster than the rate at which the video is playing, the little box will never catch up, and you can just start watching. But if your connection speed is too slow, the video won't play smoothly. In that case, you should hit the pause button and wait until the white line is longer (meaning that more of the video has loaded.) Then you can start playing, and if you need to you can pause again when the box catches up to the end of the white line. Or, you can just let the whole thing load and then play it... Have fun!

Here's a diagram:

Depending on how your system is set up, assuming you're on a PC, the above video will probably display using Windows Media player (if you don't have Windows Media Player, you can download it here.) If you're on Netscape, you might just see a white box with nothing in it until the video loads completely. If you're using Internet Explorer,

If you have any comments, criticisms, or problems viewing the video, please email me.

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