personally, i don't use realplayer. after it repeatedly crashed my old comp, i wiped it from the system and have refused to install it ever since. so, i haven't seen any of your videos until now, trenna.
i was really impressed with pel's trailers, tho, and that put me in the mood to see what was going on with this new video. of course, i'm jewish, so i don't usually watch xmas videos, but hey... it's l&c.
right now, i'm waiting for it to download (the original download glitched partway through, and i'm on dialup. it says that at this rate, it'll be over an hour... <sigh>), but i thought i'd post about kathy's problem. when i saw her post, i went looking for options. none of the programs i had could do the conversion, but i did a net search. it turned up two useful things.
first was a mac message board that had a thread discussing this exact issue. it seems that the mac version of wmp can't handle the latest wmv codex, which is, of course, exactly the one that windows movie maker uses. microsoft just doesn't like to share. so, that's probably why you're having problems kathy.
more practical was a trail of links that led me to [url=http://www.essien.de/products/convertwizard/[/url] which offers a program that converts video from one format to another. it can't do wmv to rm, but it can do wmv to avi or mpg. i don't think avi is that common, but i don't think anyone will have a problem finding a player that can handle mpg. what's also nice is that the program is small (the installer is only 850k... less than 1 meg!), and it's cheap, too (it's shareware... you get a few conversions free. not sure what happens after that, but it's only $20 to keep if it works out).
i downloaded and installed it, and it seems to work pretty well. i used it on one of the trailers, and it converted it to mpg1 format readily enough. a few hitches in the playback, but nothing too bad. it did double the file size, tho. i'm going to try playing around with it a bit, see if i can get it to do better. even if i can't, it's better than nothing.
i unfortunately don't have enough free webspace to host the converted files, but, if pel and trenna don't have any objections, i can download the files, convert them, and email them out on request.
for the future, if the converter can be made to work smoothly, i'd suggest mpg as the video format of choice. either that or mov if there's a way to do that.
EDIT: the transfer rate went up after a while, so it took a bit less than an hour. just watched the video. nice job.
it's very sweet, and i especially liked the use of the space rat scene.
okay, time to head out for the night.
Paul
