Viewing Blog Movies

Do the movies on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet 

play ‘catch-up’ all the time when you try to watch them? 

Or do you have to view them in the lowest quality to be 

able to view them at all? There are several ways to work 

around a slow Internet connection, but here is one way

to watch the movies in high quality.

My movies are all filmed and saved in a quality suitable to be viewed in 720p and they all look better on a full screen. However, the higher quality movie, the larger file size, and many viewers will find that their Internet connection just isn't fast enough to stream (download) the movies directly. It will therefore be necessary to ‘help’ the download a bit.

To watch movies in the small window on the blog: Start the movie, press pause straight away, then in the bottom-right corner, next to the plus sign, choose for example 720p. Choosing a different quality setting will sometimes make the film start again, if you were quick to press pause, but you can always drag the silver button that runs along the progress bar to the left to start from the beginning.  To see the progress bar while the movie download for you: hold the mouse over the bottom part of the screen. The pink bar is what has downloaded so far and the red is what you have played already. When you have downloaded more than half the movie, press play to start the movie. If you have a very slow connection you might catch up with what you have downloaded, if that happens, press pause again and wait a bit more :-)

To watch the movie in full screen: click the full-screen button in the bottom-right corner of the movie, then press play and then pause immediately after and follow the same instructions as above.

Just so you can try out the instructions in this post, here is a short movie with some pictures of my lovely cat. Make sure you view it in full screen :-)

If your Internet connection is extremely slow, or you are trying to watch a movie on a time of day when it is at the busiest, it might take a long time to download some of my longer movies on a 720p setting. Try 480p if you can’t wait for 720p, but the trade-off then will be less picture quality.

And if you get any annoying ads popping up whilst watching, just click the X inside the ad. The reason why my movies often get an ad from YouTube is because I use classical music downloaded (‘borrowed’) from the Internet. YouTube detects that the music isn’t my original and therefore might be protected by Copyright – and in return they splash on an ad of their own choice. Not much I can do about that, except produce my own music as well as the film. Might do that some time in the future, who knows, but for now I am happy with the compromise with YouTube; they allow me to use ‘borrowed’ music, but the price to pay is to endure an ad, which can easily be removed as long as you know how to :-)

Any questions, please post them below here. Good luck :-)