Video guidelines

How video works on our website

Delivery
The videos are delivered via progressive download (although the player itself denotes this as ‘streaming’). This means that the video is delivered as quickly as your internet speed will allow and downloads it to the Temporary Internet Files folder on your computer.

Having it downloaded to this folder means that if you wish to watch it again in the same internet session, it will not have to download again and you will be able to watch it at full speed with no pauses. In the initial download/viewing, the video may pause several times in order to ‘buffer’ enough seconds of video for the player to keep playing.

Depending on your internet browser settings, you may potentially watch the video again in another session without it having to download again.

Format
The videos are encoded in FLV (Flash Video) which is fast becoming the accepted standard for delivering video on the internet due to its ability to compress the file size of the video while maintaining a reasonable level of picture and sound quality.

It plays through the free Adobe Flash Player which, according to Adobe, is installed on 99% of computers worldwide. Depending on how the video has been created, you may need to upgrade to a newer version of the Flash Player in order to view the video correctly.

Viewing
When you click a video link on our website, the video will open on top of the current page in the default player. You can click the close button under the video, or the Escape key on your keyboard to return to the page below.

On a standard dial-up internet connection, 1mb of data could download on a 56k modem in as little as 20 seconds but can take significantly longer than that because of connection speed, line noise, and other factors beyond your control. It can take as long as a minute (or longer) to download 1mb on a 56k dial up connection which means the video could take much longer to download (although you are able to begin viewing the video long before it has finished downloading).

If you have the Adobe Flash Player installed but are unable to view the videos, it may be due to restrictions within your organisation. Some corporate firewalls block flash video content because of the bandwidth it consumes, so please check with your information technology support to see whether you are able to view flash video.

Page last updated: 20 January 2010