Thomas' Work Space

There are several things you can try when having trouble playing video from the internet. I made a list here (less would be more, but hey, it’s computers, right?): 

1. Refresh the web page (f5 or ctrl-f5).
2. Can you see an error message on the page itself? some video services prevent you from watching video abroad BBC iPlayer used to do this, since it is financed by fees of a local audience – so are ARD and ZDF, but they do not bother restricting by viewer location. However, they assume you are in Germany, and in their time zone, so they restrict you from watching the equivalent of R-rated content during daytime in Germany.
3. Restart the web browser.
4. Can your web browser play a video from a different website. Good candidates are Youtube.com (may be HTML5 delivered by now), hulu.com, ARD Mediathek if trying ZDF Mediathek or vice versa). Maybe your plug-in has crashed – try restarting your computer.
5. Try a different web bowser (chrome, internet explorer, Firefox, safari, opera are all free downloads).
6. Can you discern a notification bar on top of your web browser window telling you of an error or asking you to upgrade something?
7. At this point it might be easier to come to the LRC and use what we maintain for you there, or, if you are trying to use your office computer, alter the helpdesk.
8. Do you have to upgrade your video-plugin? Currently (before HTML5 delivered plug-in free video), most videos are plug-in based. search for adobe flash and MS-Silverlight upgrades.
9. Do you have to upgrade your browser?
10. Do you have to upgrade your operating system? your computer hardware? Let’s hope you do not get to here in this list…

1. The first screencast example uses insert tones and a gut amount of pause, for an interpreting exercise, into an authentic German political speech
   1. 1:00 search for a break (button: play/stop  - pause prevents edits)
   2. 1:05 move the cursor to the break (mouse left-click on timeline)
   3. 1:20 insert a pause (menu:Generate / Silence )
   4. 1:25 zoom in (button:magnifying glass, CTRL + mouse scroll wheel)
   5. 1:45 generate a tone (menu:Generate / Noise), change the duration
   6. 2:10 do not replace the selection
   7. 2:20 use undo, just like in MS-word and other programs
   8. 2:30 move the cursor to the start of the selection (mouse left-click on timeline)
   9. 2:40 generate a tone (menu:Generate / Noise)
   10. don’t forget to review results before distributing to students
2. the second screencast example, of post-editing a questions/response exercise in ESL, takes the amount of pause inserted from the recorded teacher instruction for the student, and uses copy/paste to speed things up even more.
3. You can also only insert tones and not pauses, as in the 3rd screencast, and allow the students flexible pause lengths, if you can rely on the Sanako Student recorder Voice insert. Or if you must, let students use audacity for recording also, and have them learn how to move the recording cursor around manually, and throw away the source track.

On popular request: Deutschland Radio still does live streaming, but their on demand archive is also very good. Unlike Deutsche Welle  which has discontinued    live streaming geared neither  towards  expats, nor language learners  though.

1. The /gdi switch for Windows Media Center allows for operating Windows Media Center full screen during
   1. Windows Live Messenger Remote Assistance sessions if you have to help a relative over the internet.
   2. Should also work in MSTSC Remote Desktop sessions if you manage media with Windows Media Center on your work network.
2. You can combine the above switch e.g. with the program guide shortcut to go directly there: /homepage:VideoGuide.xml /PushStartPage:True
3. Put the following in the “Target” field of your shortcut that you start on the remote computer (running Windows7 32-but here) during your remote assistance session:
4. %windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe /nostartupanimation /gdi /homepage:VideoGuide.xml /PushStartPage

5. Voilà, or rather: "Dem Inschenör ist nichts zu schwör".
6. 

1. VLC-player
   1. version 1.1.9,  but also currently newest 1.1.11 as well on Windows CXP SP 3
   2. opens from IE8 and Firefox 3.6
   3. but is not able to play files (tested even multi) through. Rather, it nicely falls on its face, with the audio stream simply appearing to stop, mid-sentence, after 2:38 (pretty consistently – a buffering bug? A great way to slip through pre-testing).
   4. In the LRC, I could hardly bring the taskswitcher up, let alone (15 minutes of waiting) the task manager, to even find that vlc.exe is the culprit, with a CPU utilization of 99% solid (Ouch!).
   5. Not quite so bad in the office computer where it hovered slightly above 25%, maybe busying  only one CPU core.
2. My Google searches do not find anything quite similar.
3. RealPlayer 14 to the rescue?
   1. In IE8, RealPlayer does not open when clicking on the web page link with the RM file which causes a dialogue to open if VLC-player is the default player, rather a strange unplayable content error..
   2. 
   3. In Firefox, RealPlayer open and plays (and pre-buffers) the stream completely.
   4. Note that ereserves “download as zip” cannot serve as a workaround: gives you only the links like http://dlib4.uncc.edu/streaming/media_play.php?file=9364cb66b9e1cae26aed0f471e9eab5b, which require you to re-authenticate, even if in the same browser session, and do not redirect to the resource, neither audio nor web page form which you could launch the audio (in short, I do not get what this download as zip is good for)
   5. Next Problem: This may work on my office computer. In the lab we have NetOp School installed. That adds another layer of NetOp School problems which look like they can be resolved next time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible. next time I get around to design and run a Symantec-Ghost Software and File Action on the computers (all LRC lab PCs) and test the result (on PC10) which was now.

1. Too bad:
1. And in those last news: “The Chinese government demands reforms in the Euro-zone before providing financial help”.
2. I remember a time when Deutsche Welle was available during family vacation only via short wave radio. Now, the on-demand offerings of the Deutsche Welle will be expanded. They are more useful for language learning than live streaming anyway.

1. Learners of Mandarin can increase not only their cross-cultural knowledge, when using the English versions of two of the biggest Chinese newspapers: “China Daily has adopted Engkoo’s “hover translation” feature—hover your cursor over an English word or phrase and get an inline Chinese translation— on its China-facing website” and the People’s Daily, the largest official newspaper in China, uses the same feature in its English website”
2. Make sure you are on the right version (English version for Chinese user) of the site (are the choices you want to see on top) and “Enable Bing Dictionary”in lower right corner:
3. Then hover: .

1. China Daily is the largest Chinese newspaper available in English. It has a variety of versions: here is the version for the US, for cross-cultural learning, while the English version for speakers of Chinese is valuable both for learners of Mandarin and English.
2. The government-run newspaper People’s Daily has an English version, also with language learner glossing.

1. I am trying to replace – in the routine cases that do not need post-editing, but where speed is of the essence – my practice to post-process my screencasts in MS-Expression Encoder (installed on one machine only) and upload the result with a page to load a Silverlight Control – all hosted on my MS-Windows Azure portfolio.
2. Much easier and quicker would it be to store screencasts in MS-SkyDrive (mapping to drives in MS-Windows enables a more robust drag and drop than the still browser-specific web version on live.com), and top take advantage the embed links provided.
3. Unfortunately, WordPress.com, my blogging platform,  does not support iframes with videos from MS-SkyDrive.
4. However, by linking to the URL in the embed code, to open in a new window (with the inelegant instruction to “click on the thumbnail that opens”; if it loads slow, the thumbnail ALT displays essentially the same),:
5. I can get the  user to an MS- Silverlight control which loads:
6. and plays the video:
7. more user-friendly and robustly (This has been tested to work on MS-Windows 7 with IE9 and Firefox 3.6) than distributing the bare WMVs of my screencasts directly.

Sneak preview (larger view here) of the searchable online database with internet background information lookup (Note: work in progress, hard-”head” area!):

Friends of the UNCC-LRC can open this link in Excel-web-app (in your web browser, internet explorer or Firefox): https://skydrive.live.com/edit.aspx?cid=0025C841818181C2&resid=25C841818181C2%21164

More than one LRC assistant can edit the sheet at the same time, just not the same cell. so: if there is more than 1 lab assistant on duty, the one whose first name is closer to the end of the alphabet starts from the bottom row of the spreadsheet and works her way up

Click on the link “try UPC lookup”,

On the page that opens, if there is a picture of the movie with “buy from amazon”, right click on the link to amazon.com, select “copy shortcut”, and paste the shortcut into the column “buy from amazon”

Find the original movie title on the page, copy it into spreadsheet  column “UPC title original”,

If there is title English translation, copy it into “UPC title English translation”

Click on link “try worldcat”,  do the same as above with the spreadsheet columns “ISBN title original” and “translation”,