Viewing the lectures

You can view the lectures online, or download them for offline viewing. You can also view them on a computer or on an iPod. On the computer, you'll need flash player to view the videos. Flashplayer plugin or ActiveX control needs to be installed to view the lectures in the browser. You can also use a standalone flash player or VLC media player to view the downloaded lectures. Older lectures are in .swf or .flv format. More recent ones are in .mp4 format and are also available in .m4v(iPod) format(320×240 video, AAC audio). You can replace the .html file with .flv or .mp4 as appropriate to download the lecture. For .swf files, right click and do save link as. If using a standalone player, open the media files, or the *_controller.swf if you have downloaded the whole directory.

You need Adobe Flash player version 8 or greater to view the videos correctly. The following platforms/browsers have been tested

• Firefox on Linux(Mandrake, CentOS): To install flashplayer 9, you need to copy libflashplayer.so to plugins/ and flashplayer.xpt to components/ under your installation directory(e.g. /usr/local/firefox/plugins) You also need to have Javascript enabled(Edit→Preferences→Content). Sometimes sound doesn't seem to work-this apparently is a known issue with firefox 2.0 and flashplayer 9. It works fine on my CentOS machine. Sound fails on Mandrake. Works fine on Firefox 3+
• Konqueror on Linux(Mandrake, CentOS): This works. To use the flash plugins, go to Settings→Configure Konqueror→Plugins and specify the directory under which you have libflashplayer.so(e.g. /usr/local/firefox/plugins)
• Firefox on Windows: Works fine after installing flashplayer plugin
• Internet Explorer 6 on Windows: Works fine after installing flashplayer plugin
• Internet Explorer 7 on Windows: Doesn't play and asks you to have the correct flashplayer version. There seem to known issues with IE7 and flashplayer ActiveX control. Get Firefox!
• Google chrome: Works fine
• You can download the standalone flash player from Adobe.

Please send your comments on any aspect of the videos-form, content, usefulness, usability, bugs, and fixes to nagendra at iitm dot ac dot in.