Video Production/Watching Video on the Internet

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Watching Video on the Internet[edit | edit source]

Subscribing to Podcasts[edit | edit source]

Podcasts are content feeds provided in formats such as Atom, RSS, and XML, among others.

iTunes

iTunes can be used to subscribe to a Video as well as an audio podcast. See /Subscribing to a Podcast in iTunes.

Democracy Player

Democracy player is an open source way of subscribing to video podcasts. It also has a Channel Viewer which makes it easy to find new content. See /Subscribing to a Podcast in Democracy Player.

Fireant Player

Fireant Player is another podcasting program.

Watching Video Files in a Media Player[edit | edit source]

To watch a video from the internet you need to have certain software installed on your computer that will enable it to play the video. If you already have something installed, this could be windows media player (pc), quicktime (mac). Even so, you might have trouble watching some films, so why not download and use:

There is some information explaining container and codecs here. http://video.indymedia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=encoding

Why can't I play this video file?

Maybe the Media player application you are using doesn't support the file container you are using. For example Windows Media player won't play a .mov file. The mov container isn't supported.

Or maybe you don't have the codec used to encode the file installed on your computer. For example you may be able to play some .avi files but not other .avi files. If you open them up in Windows Media player it may even say Missing Codec.

You can install codecs on your computer by downloading them from the internet.

On windows you can use a program called Gspot to find out what container and codec have been used to encode the video file. there is a help file here.

Below are links to useful programs and help filed to make sure you can watch your video files.

Cross platform[edit | edit source]

  • VLC is a free software program for Linux, Mac and PC that will play most video formats. There are a list of formats that it will play listed here. You will see that it will play just about everything apart from real player format. If you install this program hopefully all of your problems viewing files will be solved.

Windows[edit | edit source]

Gspot tell you how a video file is encoded and what container it is using. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/v26x/quick_start.html