Video Technical Specifications and Help

Introduction

Most of the videos on ʻŌlelo|Online have been recorded at 30 fps (frames per second) at a size of 1024 by 720 pixels, which is only a few pixels short of HD quality. You can either stream them to view in your computer’s web browser, tablet, phone, or similar device; or download them for use when not connected to the internet.

Streaming Playback

The full-size, medium, and small videos are in MP4 format. These MP4’s should play on all Macs, Windows PCs, iPads, iPhones, and most Android or similar devices directly through the internet (“streaming”), but it all depends on the speed of your connection.

You should select the small, medium, or large file to match your network connection speed (bandwidth). If you have a fast connection such as good Wi-Fi or LTE over cellular, use the full-size (large) videos. If you have a medium-speed connection such as at Starbucks or 4G on your phone, then use the medium-sized reduced versions. If you have a very slow connection such as 3G cellular, then click on the link for the small video.

If you are using Firefox on Windows, you may find that the MP4 versions do not play. In this case, try playing the WebM file in your browser, or else download it and play it using VLC Player on your PC. We have found that both the MP4 and WebM versions play properly in the new Windows 10 web browser.

Downloading

If you wish to download any of the files rather than streaming them to your web browser, you should right-click on the video link and select “Save Linked File As…” (or whatever similar choice your browser has). You can use iTunes, QuickTime Player, or VLC Player on Macs or Windows PCs to play the files on your desktops and there are many apps which can play videos on tablets including VLC Player for iOS and Android.

Viewing The Videos

Press the double-arrow button on the bottom right of the Safari, iPad, or iPhone version to play the video full-screen!

For the best experience when viewing the video on a tablet or small-screened device such as a phone, we recommend using full-screen mode (shown above). Simply click the double-arrow button to enlarge the video to fill your screen.

If you are using a desktop computer with a large enough screen, then you can simply play the video in a window and then use your computer to follow along with texts, or take notes, or look things up in the online dictionaries, and so on.

Behind The Scenes

The audio is recorded with a wonderful dynamic Heil PR-40 microphone from Heil Sound hooked up to my MacBook Pro. I use a large Intuos4 tablet from Wacom and Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro to draw the lessons and then capture the whole thing with Screenflow from Telestream.net. The font I use is called “KT Memolima” which is of my own creation.

I use the free excellent Miro video converter to transcode all the video files and iTunes to provide meta-tags for the web, iPad, and iPhone versions.

I think it takes me about six hours of work to make an average 15 minute video from start to having it up online.

Format Specifications

The videos are generally available as encoded in the following formats:

1. MPEG4 MP4 H.264 (video) and MPEG4 AAC 44.1kHz (audio) encoding for use on Mac and Windows-based computers as well as iPad;
2. Small MP4 version for iPhone, iPod Touch, and other similar portable devices. This is just a downsampled 640 x 540 pixel version of the iPad file;
3. WEBM, Google’s relatively new HTML5 open video format, using VP8 (for video) and Vorbis 44.1kHz (for audio); and
4. OGG from XIPH using Theora video and Vorbis 44.1kHz audio encoding, for Linux users and other true tech geeks!

The MP4 versions have album artwork and file information which should make them look well-organized inside iTunes on your Mac or Windows PC, on your iPads, iPhones, iPods, AppleTVs, and so on.

System Requirements – Mac and iOS

All Macs can play back the MP4 videos. Note that if you are using the Firefox web browser to stream the videos, you may be required to use the WebM format version of the video you wish to stream. If you play a downloaded video on a Mac, iTunes will most likely be the default player; you can select either QuickTime Player or VLC Player if you prefer, however, by right-clicking (control-clicking) on the file and selecting the app you wish to use under the “Open With…” option.

I highly recommend Apple’sSafari on the Mac as the best web-browser to use for these videos; next in line would be Google’s Chrome, then Mozilla’s Firefox.

System Requirements – Windows

You will need to have QuickTime installed in your Windows PC to play the QuickTime MP4 versions. If you already have iTunes, then you already have QuickTime installed; if not, you can download it directly from Apple (QuickTime, iTunes).

On the desktop, I recommend Chrome first, followed by Firefox, and then the new Windows 10 browser. Last of all would be Internet Exploder, which often has such idiosyncrasies that one never knows whether or not a given page will render properly on screen. You always have the option of downloading any video, and then you can play it back using VLC Player on your PC. We have tested Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 10, and all seem to work fine.

Troubleshooting

If you click on a video’s link and nothing seems to happen, you may need to have “pop-up blocking” turned off in your web browser to allow the videos to open up in a new window or tab when you click on the links. Use the Help files in your web-browser to learn how to turn blocking on or off.

Video may also take a while to stream to your device. Note that once you click on a video link and a new blank page opens, the stream may take up to one minute to buffer enough to start playing; please be patient as it is dependent on your connection speed (broadband, 3G, etc). The video will start to play when enough has been buffered. If you prefer, just right-click on the video link and select to save the file on your own computer as described above. Then you can play the whole thing at your leisure, with or without an internet connection. The video files are generally between 30 and 80 megabytes (MB) in size, depending on the version.

If you cannot play one of the video versions, please try another version; it is not expected that all three versions will work on your particular device. If none of the three versions works, then please contact us and let us know what kind of browser and device you are using, and we’ll see if we can just send you a version encoded for your specific device. Use the Contact Form.

Aloha!

Rev. 2016-01-24, 2011-11-13, 2011-10-06

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