Video Links Details

The viewer on the Video Links page tries four different ways to play the video through your browser. It first asks your browser if it can display an .mp4 file directly. If yes, then it sends the MP4 version. If not, it asks your browser if it can display a .webm file. If yes, then it sends the WEBM version. If not, it asks your browser if it can handle an Apple HTTP Live Stream (HLS). If yes, it sends an .m3u8 file that the browser can read and then choose a suitable stream to play. If not, then the viewer asks your browser to use the Adobe Flash Player plugin to display an .mp4 file and sends the MP4 version. Newer browsers that handle HTML 5 should be able to play an MP4 video or a WEBM video. iOS devices  can also handle HLS streaming in addition to MP4. Older browsers that are not HTML 5 compliant will typically rely on the Flash Player plugin. The MP4 and WEBM videos are 1280 x 720 in resolution. The HLS set allows the browser (or its helper application) to switch among  (1) 512 x 288 at 110kbps and 10 frames per second, (2) 512 x 288 at 230 kbps at 15 frames per second, (3) 512 x 288 at 480 kbps at 30 frames per second, (4) 640 x 360 at 990 kbps and 30 frames per second, (5) 852 x 480 at 1800 kbps and 30 frames per second, and (6) 1280 x 720 at 3000kbps and 30 frames per second. This doesn’t count the 64 kbps used by the audio. QuickTime Player version 10 (but not version 7) also knows how to handle Apple HTTP Live Streams. There thus is a fairly high probability that the viewer can find something your browser will be able to display.

Nevertheless, there are reasons you might not have found the above viewer satisfactory. If you have a low powered device that doesn’t accept Apple HTTP Live Streams, playback would not have been smooth on your device. Even if it played well, you might have preferred downloading the video to save on your device so you can play it a little at a time or play it several times without having to pay for the data traffic several times. Or you might want to view a video when your device is off line rather than being required to be on line to view a video. For these various reasons, we have put several formats out where you can download and save the files. These files are on a Dropbox server rather than on DaffTube although the hyperlinks to these files are on DaffTube.   Two of them are the same .mp4 and .webm files that the above viewer was offering. Three of them are lower resolution and lower bandwidth .mp4 files. We chose the MP4 format since almost every device can play an .mp4 file as long as the resolution and data rate demanded by the file are within the device’s and the network’s capability. If you use a FireFox browser that accepts WEBM videos but not MP4 videos, we suggest you get an additional browser that does accept .mp4 files in order to use the lower resolution .mp4 files. The fifth is an .m4v file. The M4V format was devised by Apple and is a generalization of an .mp4 file. One important difference is that the .m4v file supports a chapter track. You can think of a chapter track as a table of time points and chapter titles.  If you have an application that displays .m4v files (as all Apple iOS devices do and as iTunes can do), you can display the chapter table and jump to the chapter of your choice. This can be very handy for repeated viewings of a section (chapter) of a video. Obviously, you have to have the entire video file on your disk to be able to jump to any chapter, so this is not a format suitable for immediate viewing as the data arrives from a server.  Note also that lower resolution, lower bandwidth files don’t necessary get smaller in the same proportions because they use milder compression that can be decompressed with less CPU power. The sample videos have a label in the upper right corner to let you know the format of the version you are viewing. The label will be MP4, WEBM, HLS, or M4V.

If you’re able to view the M4V version, the times in seconds and titles you should see for the chapters are: 0 Chapter One, 1 Near Beginning, 6 Just After Title, 13 Show Back of Daffodil, 53 Axial Balance, 58 Last Couple of Seconds.

If you’re able to view the Apple HTTP Live Stream (HLS), you’re probably using an iOS device or have an application designed to handle such streams. There were versions of the Android system advertised to hand HLS, but the handling was flawed and subsequently withdrawn. There is no need to contact us if you have an Android device that attempts to display the HLS stream but does so unreliably.