Accept no substitutes

Testing MP4 streams – Folkstreams

Angel that stands by me
I need your help. We’ve encoded a lot of films in MP4 for streaming — usually your QuickTime player will play the streams whilst embedded in your browser. If you could try streaming the documentary about Wilmington visionary artist Minnie Evans called “The Angel That Stands By Me” or “Give My Poor Heart Ease: Mississippi Delta Bluesmen” featuring BB King then let me know if you get a good smooth stream, the size of the picture, and any quality issues, I’d appreciate it.
If you have difficulties, could you also try streaming “Self Preservation In An Atomic Attack” from the Prelinger Archives at Archive.org and let me know if that movie is handled differently.
Much thanks and enjoy the movies.

8 Comments

  1. akb

    The movies play fine when I have a stable net connection and use Windows. I can’t play them when I’m on a Linux box (mplayer or vlc). I would also prefer that the movies be downloadable, mplayer doesn’t seem to have a problem w/ qt or mp4 files that are downloaded. Also for movies of this length I usually download them to my laptop and watch them while travelling or otherwise not online.

  2. Paul Jones

    We’d love to offer downloads, but the film makers in most cases wouldn’t allow that option. So rather than have it so that you couldn’t see the films at all, we chose to offer the most open high quality streaming format — mp4.
    Odd that they don’t work in Linux. Does anyone else have that problem?

  3. PomeRantz

    All 3 work just fine for me, & I tried them in Firefox 1.0.2, IE 6.0.2900 & Netscape 7.1. The stream is really smooth actually, & displays as 5×4″. The streaming version of the Prelinger vid is handled the same as the folkstreams vids.

  4. Jason

    Here at MTSU, none of them streamed cleanly. The two Ibiblio films give me no sound, and no continuous video…just single frames, updated every few seconds. The Prelinger vid gave me sound, but the same video. It also displayed at half the size of the Ibib streams.

    This is on a university pipe/Firefox, with nothing else using bandwidth in the background. I’ll try again later and see what happens.

  5. Miles

    looks and sounds fine from austin under os x using safari.

  6. Max

    Tried it with Safari and it looks great to me. Kind of a long time connecting, tho, and if I wasn’t so determined, I might not have waited.

  7. akb

    Well, lucky that the streaming Real files are still available which mplayer does allow to be downloaded for offline viewing. If you really need to protect the files from download you’ll need to exclude Linux altogether and use DRM.

  8. dwpbike

    and neither option works on linux (fedora 8 w/firefox).

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