Lectopia @ UWA - Delivery Format Changes

Overview

For 2008, Lectopia will be producing fewer formats, most notably we will no longer be publishing Windows Media formats. This means that you will no longer be able to download WMS files for Windows Media Player from the Lectopia system; however formats such as MP3 and MP4, will still be made available.

As a replacement for Windows Media, we will be publishing Flash media, which is the new preferred format for all Lectopia recordings. Additionally, QuickTime media will still be published.

Reasons

Windows Media takes significantly longer for Lectopia to process and publish. Flash media will compress much faster than Windows Media, which means your lectures will be made available much sooner after the lecture finishes. Continuing to deliver Windows Media would not have allowed Lectopia to offer this improvement.

Impact

Firstly, your lectures will be made available much sooner than before. Typically screen capture lectures will be available online within 1 hour of recording.

The quality of Flash video is far superior to that of Windows Media when comparing equivalent file sizes, which means your lectures will be clearer and video will be smoother during playback. Additionally the file sizes are smaller and will use less of bandwidth.

Flash is widely supported by multiple platforms, browsers and has been widely adopted across the Internet (think YouTube!). The player is easily installed and our research indicates that over 80% of students here at UWA already have the player installed on their computers.

If you are not sure if you have Flash Player installed, please visit the following URL and install it, it's a very easy process.

http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer

Troubleshooting

I can't download my lectures anymore!

Yes, unfortunately you will no longer be able to download Windows Media files to your local computer. However, you will be able to download MPEG-4 files, which you will be able save and play on your machine with VLC and QuickTime.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

VLC is an open source media player available for a variety of operating systems. It is a small download and has a simple installer that will get you playing MPEG-4 files almost immediately.