Help with Audio & Video

The Am Baile Web site has a large number of audio and video items. To listen to or view these items you will need to have Windows Media player (version 6.4 or later) installed on your machine.

Most new computers include this software but should your machine not have it installed or should you decide to upgrade to a later version then you can do so from Microsoft's web site.

As standards for encoding and playback of audio and video are continually evolving, your player may occasionally need to download a new CODEC from Microsoft's web site - this is to ensure the highest quality of playback - this will be done automatically when required.

The quality of audio and video items on the site has been optimised to provide the highest quality at the lowest bandwidth. They are available in two versions suited to either a FAST or SLOW Internet connection.

The FAST (streamed) versions will start playing before it is all downloaded, whilst the SLOW (downloadable) version will need to be downloaded in its entirety before it starts playing.

The videos have been encoded at 192Kbps which means that for them to be streamed effectively, you will need to have a high speed, broadband connection to the internet.

Fig1. Video FAST and SLOW option buttons

The streamed version uses URLs such as mms://212.53.85.159:8080/323/32389.wmv. The "mms://" at the beginning indicates that it is to use Microsoft's Media Streaming protocol and the ":8080" means that it should use port 8080. These are slightly non-standard access methods and therefore may cause issues for some users – in particular if you are accessing the site from a corporate network which is protected by a firewall or if you have a personal firewall, you must ensure that the above configuration is permitted. Further information is available on firewall configurations from Microsoft's Support Site - article 189416.

Note that older browsers e.g. Netscape 4 and versions for Macintosh do not recognise the mms protocol, so you should either update your web browser or use the downloadable version of the video.

Should you have ongoing problems, or need to upgrade your software, please seek a solution on Microsoft's web site.