Many thanks to all of you who “voted” in the Media & Connection polls. The results are in, and here they are:
As you can see, the vast majority of you are able to play both the video and audio media on this site. Almost all the rest of you can access one or the other, and one of you can’t play either. With apologies to whichever of you is the latter, I don’t think we can do much better than this overall.
One thing has become much clearer to me in this process, and I would summarize it as follows: Both the videos on YouTube and the audio in the Google Player use Macromedia Flash to encode and playback the media. If you don’t have a reasonably current version of Flash, this may be part of the problem. Also, I have discovered that on some PCs — including Aliy’s! — Windows Media tries to intercept the mp3 audio instead of letting Flash handle it. I think this may be the reason why a few of you either don’t even see the Google Player or can’t get it to play. I am completely unfamiliar with Windows, so I’m afraid I can’t offer any kind of suggestions here. Probably the best way to handle it is to use the “workaround” of linking to the source mp3 and letting Windows handle that however it wants to.
Looking at the connection types, it encourages me that the vast majority of you have some kind of hi-speed internet. This, of course, is a necessary component in viewing media-rich sites like ours, and I can only hope that the few of you who are still on dial-up will have access to hi-speed sometime soon. Sadly, you really don’t get to experience “the real internet” until you’ve got hi-speed.
My hope is that over time you will all have hi-speed access on updated computers, such that everyone can play everything. Meanwhile, thanks again for the help. I’m relieved to know that the problems are fairly few. I will continue to look for ways to fix them, but for now I will just apologize, again, for any inconvenience and leave things as they are.
