Flash is disabled on all of our machines due to the history of serious stability issues and vulnerabilities. (most of the time we also avoid enabling scripts from other domains, and don't even try if there are more than a couple or it isn't obvious which is for what)
I wouldn't have watched the videos if I hadn't been able to stream or download to another player.
Both videos played smoothly streamed into VLC with the Open Network command. The Jobs video clearly had older codecs, the audio was very marginal. The aspect ratio had to be forced to 16:9 to look right. For some reason VLC recogonized it as 4:3.
It was generally well produced and easy to follow. The bit about MS investing 150 million in non-voting stock probably should have mentioned the deal including a few other things too - avoiding litigation over the unauthorized copied QuickTime code that had been put in Video For Windows, Apple getting continued Office for Mac updates, MS getting Apple to keep I.E. as the default browser for the minimum term of the investment (3 years)
The Facebook video sounded much better and played fine without forcing modes although it displayed as 16:9 inside of 4:3 (black letterbox area seem to be part of video). For 120 meg and 220 meg, h.264 could have delivered great quality at well above the 320*240 or so those are. Even phone displays can handle/show much more detail, but the videos didn't look bad.
I don't mean to be overly critical, just trying to provide detailed feedback. I enjoyed watching both videos. Thank you.
Now I see why some say a 250 meg data plan is way too limiting. The Jobs video alone would nearly eat it up.
Old codecs cost everyone.
Player would reset to the beginning several times, and wouldn't let me skip to the part I was currently watching. FLV file is much easier to deal with :)
The player skipped to the beginning when I tried to pause it. This happened three times before I decided to get the download link from the markup. I am using Opera on Windows 7.
I haven't yet watched the video, so I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic... but I vividly remember a time in undergrad when I read Cringely regularly. I'd get all excited about these huge claims (e.g. "Mac Mini is built just for taking over the living room"[1]) and would start talking to anyone who would listen about these big, exciting possibilities. Then I realized it was just a gripping style of writing and the ideas weren't particularly earth-shattering... or correct. THEN, I found out the guy's a liar: "In 1998, it was revealed that Stephens had falsely claimed to have received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and to have been employed as a professor there."[2]
I've got one for you. Sometimes he'd write about tech that was twisted enough to raise a few eyebrows and bring a chuckle or two. I was surprised to see this on pbs:
Did you watch the video? In the video, they show clip from Steve's commencement speech where he talks about adoption. I think the video was very interesting and covered Steve's career pretty well.
I assume that the Zuckerberg video has one, too, but couldn't find it.