How to watch the video
You need a compatible web browser and/or a compatible media player.
The lecture videos are very large (and not-so-good quality) while the screencasts are shorter but very high quality, which in both cases means that these are relatively large files. If you are going to watch at home then you may prefer to download the files (using the fast YSU network) and watch them locally (rather than streaming over the Internet).
You can right click a video screencast and save it (for example) to the Desktop. Then copy it to a flash drive and transfer it to your home computer. Or, you can just save it to the flash drive in the first place.
Table of Contents
1 Web browser
You will need a web browser that supports the Ogg (Theora+Vorbis) and/or WebM free video container formats. Currently the only such browsers are Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera. (I recommend Firefox.)
Mozilla Firefox (need version 3.5 or greater): http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
Google Chrome (version 3 or greater): http://www.google.com/chrome/
Opera (version 10.5 or greater): http://www.opera.com/
Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) does not support Ogg-Theora natively, but apparently there exists a plugin that allows a user to run Google Chrome through IE. Read about it here.
2 Media Player
You can watch the video streaming over the Internet or save the files to your computer and open the local files with a media player that supports free video formats. The best one of those is VLC player.
Go here for the VLC home page: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
To download VLC for Microsoft Windows go here:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html
If you have trouble with administrative privileges on your computer then download the "Windows zip packages (No installer needed)". Then right click and Extract the folder someplace, click inside the folder, and look for an icon that says "VLC media player". The icon looks like an orange highway cone.
3 How to watch Streaming Video
In VLC go Media -> Open Network Stream... Then copy-paste the address to the video you want to watch in the box that opens, for example,
rtsp://gort.cushwa.ysu.edu/kerns/STAT3743/STAT3743_082310.rm
or
http://www.ysumathstat.org/faculty/kerns/STAT3743/STAT3743_082310.rm
Finally, press Play.
4 How to watch Full Screen
If you have tried to watch any screencasts then you have noticed that they are (usually) too big for the screen. This is because I have not embedded them into a web page that re-sizes them automatically to a smaller size. If I were to do that then the R code would be smaller and harder to see. There are at least three (3) ways around this.
- Watch the video locally with VLC. In the
Videomenu select "Fullscreen". - Firefox natively supports full screen video. Just right-click on the video while it's playing and select "Full screen…".
- In Google Chrome, click the wrench in the upper right corner and change the
Zoomlevel to whatever you like.