AIAA video
Laurel Stell
At the last SF Council meeting, Sylvee had an AIAA video on DVD that she
suggested we put on our Web site. I have discovered that the video is already
posted -- at least in theory. There is a link on the right hand side of
http://aiaa.org/content.cfm?pageid=6
Here are the results of the three attempts I know of to follow that link:
1. On my Linux laptop, I'm informed I don't have the latest version of Flash
Player. This is a widespread problem I have, and upgrading isn't trivial for
reasons I don't completely understand and haven't bothered to investigate.
2. On my Macintosh, the link didn't work. When I copied the link location and
pasted it into the URL box, I got a Web page that looked promising. Alas, the
video would not play.
3. I sent Sylvee (unknown OS) the link location
http://www.streammercials.com/aiaa2
She simply reported it "will not load on my computer."
CAN ANYONE GET THIS VIDEO TO PLAY? DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT IS WRONG?
Laurel
Rick Kwan
to, I get the AIAA picture frame and no movie inside of it. The URL
is: http://www.streammercials.com/aiaa2/player.htm
The player at that URL should be using something with this link:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0
Whatever that is. When I run the "file" command on the resulting file, I get:
swflash.cab: Microsoft Cabinet archive data, 1878396 bytes, 2 files
This is on my Linux box.
However, when I go elsewhere into the "streammercials" site, like
their own promotional video, it works. The surrounding HTML is pretty
similar. All I can conclude is that the AIAA package running from
their site is broken. Now... according to the promotional video, this
is done for the low cost of "less than 10 cents per prospect. That's
right, that's cheaper than mailing a letter."
I hope we didn't get charged for the failed attempts at playing the video.
BTW, I've seen the video before. I think I have the DVD at work.
About 8 minutes long. I'm amazed that AIAA didn't convert it to Flash
and put it on its own website. There is a bandwidth charge, but I
suspect it doesn't come anywhere near 10 cents for 8 minutes.
The production tools for Flash seem to be $700 to $1700, depending on
how it's bundled. There doesn't seem to be a good open source
alternative yet.
--Rick