Mac Forum / Applications / Media Player / January 2006

No, it's something else causing the problem. Several things are wrong
in fact, with their servers. I tried it on a various PCs here, and got
a barely usable "stream" - about 10-15 pictures ("frames") every 15
seconds - though the audio was more or less OK.

It's their end that's letting you down.

Let's see :

OK I can verify your problems on Mac with or without the Flip4Mac
running. They are sending about 45000 bytes per second (I'm on 4Mbps
broadband here so that's not the issue !)

It's hardly enough for audio and a reasonable picture - in some cases
that's OK cause this will hardly be "sports motion" video !

But it's far worse than it appears, because their end keeps running
out of bandwidth to serve me the content. It's simply not able to keep
up with (however many viewers) there are, and as a result the video is
being lost in transit and requires the player to "buffer" the next few
seconds.

All this suggests a number of misconfigurations at their end, as I
said. Some of those include that the "http" path you were given simply
doesn't work ... only the mms locations are working, for example
mms://www.themass.com/m-122505.wmv which is the xmas one.

If you pass this email on to them, say to them "They need to enable
http streaming from the media server. Since it appears they're running
their *web server* at the same IP, they'll have to modify the http
port used by the streaming server to other than the default - and
provide that as a link on their web page".

OK that's out of the way (Ignore the content, just pass that on ;-)

One way to get a better result will be to download the video - either
from their web server, or directly off the media server, letting the
video build up until you have a complete copy on your hard disk.

That's not possible with windows media player, at least not on the Mac
with the way they've set it up. And to get it off the web server, then
*need* to save the file and put it on there, as well as providing a
link to the web server location.

However there is at least one alternative which might work.

I've got here a program called "VideoLAN" which is an alternative
player. It's actually very powerful with a wide range of options. We
only need a few of those however to get the video down to your hard
disk where, hopefully you'll be able to watch it later.

Currently I've hardly used it at all, but I managed to get the video
into a file. I couldn't find out how to get the audio into it too,
which is obviously the point LOL but I'll let you know if I can find a
method which appears bombproof ... (stay tuned)

In the meantime, you probably need to contact them to ask em to fix
their servers !

Cheers - Neil