Movies on the Internet....

Movies tend to eat up a lot of storage space in bytes depending of course on the picture quality used.  The movies used here are predominately Apple Quicktime (AVI or MOV) format and require approximately 13 megabytes per minute.  This provides a pretty clear picture even though it is only 300 by 200 pixels in size.  At this rate, a 3 minute movie would require about a 40 megabytes file size.  For this reason, most of the movies have been (and are being) converted from MOV and AVI formats to RealPlayer (RM) with a reduced picture quality AND a reduced file size by about 94%.  With this method, a 40 meg MOV file reduces to about 2.5 megs.  While we know high quality movies are cool and available, a 6 minute, 80 megabyte file download over the internet will be frustrating.  We all know that movies are used for seeing really cool moving things while sound files are primarily used for hearing really cool things.  The pictures here are of pretty high quality and seeing that the sound quality doesn't degrade too badly in converting from MOV to RM formats, we decided you would enjoy seeing pictures while listening to the RM sounds.  The streaming video concept basically institutes a protocol whereby the movie files are played on the target machine WHILE they are being downloaded from the internet.  This is super cool and very time efficient but requires the user to provide download speed information to the server to prevent the player from outrunning the internet download capability.  It also costs extra so we'll make do with the primitive tools we have at hand.