Hello,
Some people have indicated minor problems with the Realmedia tutorials. Here is some information that might help

1. I recommend using RealPlayer 8, which is what the tutorials were made with. RealOne should work, though I've heard reports that you need to turn off Sharpening.

http//www.real.com/player/8

The above URL will take you directly to the RP8 download.

2. Unix users must use RP8 as that's the latest version that is available on Linux, Irix and Sun. The above URL will take you there for download.

3. If you do encounter problems, please let us know here on the forum.

4. We've been asked why we chose RealMedia. Basically, it's the only video format that will work on all platforms Houdini runs on. Mpeg1 doesn't count, it's too small and low-quality for video training. We're actively investigating alternatives and if anyone has suggestions, we'd love to hear. Please keep in mind we can't use a Windows-only player and the resolution and compression must be good enough to see the details in the video training.

Cheers,

Peter Bowmar

I logged in just to say that RealPlayer keeps pausing and rebuffering one of the movies - I'd been going through the interface vids slowly and started drifting off… (it was late at night) and thought I'd cheer myself with a whizz bang look at particles whereupon Real Player got halfway… and just as my brain was re focussing and waking up the damn thing went into rebuffer mode -off a cd, huh?

Anyway I have previously created screen based tutorials myself (for VTC) and have to say Quicktime is flawless - if you grab at a smallish screensize, (1024x768 is maybe the max) with the right codec, at 16bit colour you get perfect pixel for pixel playback - of course if you need to scale the grab then everything gets blurry. And the audio quality can be better with QT! But I dont know if Solaris supports QT?

But the important thing is the content - clear and well presented! thanks.

Mark Creer

Hi Mark,
Thanks for the feedback. Quicktime would be great… except it only works on Windows (and Mac of course). Do you recall which particles video gave you problems? Also, did it keep playing after rebuffering?
It's my voice that lulled you to sleep, btw, unless it was a woman's voice, which would be Val )

Cheers,

Peter B

Peter, hi - it was Val's voice on the interface stuff but dont blame her!
(as I said I've done this stuff and its a lot harder than it seems to keep the words coming smoothly, at least thats what I found!)

No I couldnt get the video to finish, I gave up after it rebuffered for about 5 minutes. It was the particle demo using an l-sys. I can give you the exact name tomorrow.

I thought Quicktime was available on linux and SGI at least - then again with Apples current software purchases and subsequent withdrawal of PC versions maybe quicktime isnt ever going to be universal.

Mark

I had this same problem with both Real Player One and 8. The solution I came up with was to copy the videos to my harddrive. They all seem to play just fine now.

Hi,

I've had this conversation with Peter Bomar, but I think it might be time to mention this more widely… I tried to download the realplayer again the other day and couldn't find the link to realplayer8, so I downloaded real one.

For the first time in many-many years I actually read that legal document which pops up. You know, the thing you have to click on that says “I agree” before it will let you get the software. Have you read this??

If you download real one, I encourage you to read the legal thing. It's very very scarey. It's been a few weeks since I read it, so I am paraphrasing from memory, but essentially, it says things like:

it's ok for real.com to run programs in the background of my computer and secretly communicate information back to real.com, even when the realplayer is not actually running.

Check it out! I could hardly believe my eyes! The sheer hide! Big Brother!

I would encourage SideFx to find an alternative. Quicktime sounds good, so long as there's a codec common to all platforms. Else, Quicktime sounds good with different codecs! Given there's a 2nd CD-ROM now, perhaps there's enough space for larger video files?

cheers,
ben.