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Frequently Asked Questions for Film & Sound Online

Service

Data/Interface Use

Technology

These questions were answered by the British Universities and Video Film Council. Content © BUFVC 2005.

Playback

Content

These questions were answered by the content team of the Managing Agent and Advisory Service (MAAS), which was responsible for producing the content for the Education Media OnLine collections. This selection of FAQs can also be found in the December 2000 edition of Media Online Focus.

Terms of Use

These questions were answered by the Advisory Service team of MAAS.

Service

Q. What is Film & Sound Online?

A. Film & Sound Online is a JISC-funded set of collections of film, video and sound material. Several hundred hours of high-quality material are available for download, either in full or as segments, and can be used freely in learning, teaching and research. Descriptions of and lists of film titles for all the collections can be found here at Film and Sound Online collections.

Q. How can I gain access to film, video and sound material from Film & Sound Online?

A. Subscriptions to Film & Sound Online are available until the end of the current agreement on 31 July 2010. The service will be free of charge until at least 31 July 2010. To subscribe, institutions must complete, sign and submit the Film & Sound Online sub-licence, which can be downloaded from the JISC website.

Q. Is IP access available for subscribing institutions?

A. Yes - if you are on a computer within your institution's IP range, and you do not see a 'login by direct access' option, your institution may not have IP-checked access enabled. Your local support staff should contact the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk with the institutional IP range to enable this access.

Please note that you will not be able to access medical-restrict films (if you are able to see this part of the service) via direct access.

Q. Is trial access available?

A. As the service is free of charge, we are not offering trials.

Q. I am from a subscribing academic institution. Who is my site representative?

A. Information on local site representatives for all EDINA services can be found on our website, at the "local site representative" link.

Please be aware that you must be using a computer at your academic institution (within its recognised IP range) to use this facility. If you need further assistance determining your local site representative, please contact the at edina@ed.ac.uk.

Q. Does EDINA provide training and support materials?

A. EDINA will run training courses for site representatives and institutional staff; we will inform Film & Sound Online site representatives of these courses and advertise them on the EDINA website, along with information on BUFVC training events.

Quick Reference Guides, training materials, a screen capture demonstration and other online user support documents are available on the EDINA website.

Data/Interface Use

Q. Our institution would like to set up Z39.50 access for Film & Sound Online. What is the target information?

A. Z39.50 target information can be found on the service website: http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk/support/z-target.shtml

Q. Where can I see a descriptions of and lists of titles in the collections in the service?

A. Outwith the service, this can be found on the service website: http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk/description/collections.html

Q. Does EDINA provide a streaming service for these films?

A. EDINA do not provide a streaming service. Other institutions have set up their own streaming services using films they have downloaded. They must be restricted to subscribing students/staff at the institution within an intranet or VLE. You can often watch films by left clicking on the download link (if software is available); these are not streaming, rather they download to the computer's temp file.

Q. I am having problems downloading films. When I click on a film (either left clicking to watch or right clicking to save), I am getting error messages such as 'Connection with server could not be established', or I am told that files are not available. What is happening?

If this is happening with all films, it is likely that a local firewall is preventing you from watching/downloading. You should speak to your local technical support and ask them to allow access to port number 8088 on machine bodach.ucs.ed.ac.uk - this is only used for films from Film & Sound Online. If you are having problems with a particular film/segment, or if changing the firewall settings does not help, please contact the EDINA Helpdesk at with as much information about your problem as possible.

Technology

I have an archive of tapes. Can I put them on the web?

This is perfectly possible. However, the economics can be difficult to justify. Digitisation, metadata creation, storage and serving will cost more than running a standard tape library. Rights issues must be considered as well, because it is necessary to obtain permission in writing before pre-recorded video recordings can be copied and encoded for delivery online.

What is a codec?

Codec stands for COder/DECoder or COmpression/DECompression and is a necessity if you are planning to play media over the web.

It is a type of format that compresses/decompresses a digital file until it is small enough to play over a web connection. Encoding or compression software will use codecs for the compression of a file. Of course there can be many variations with this process from choosing the degree of compression and codec type down to the last leg of the process, anticipating the connection speed of your customer and catering for this. Codecs can be used with streaming (live video or audio) or file-based content (AVI, MOV etc.).

For more information about codecs and a list of codecs, have a look at the following links:

What is the best codec and which settings should I use?

There is no one right codec and each is designed for a different purpose. The common codecs for web delivery are: in QuickTime, Sorenson and Cinepak; in Windows Media Player, MS MPEG4. Real uses its own codecs.

What is the best format for video that is going to be used on the web?

The factors to consider when choosing a video format are what existing infrastructure you have. If you have a Betacam editing system with digitiser then that format is fine. If you are starting from scratch it is probably worth considering using DV. The DV format is relatively cheap to use and integrates well with computers. For more information on formats in encoding, go to the 'Encoding Formats' section of this website.

What is an encoder?

An encoder is a piece of software/hardware used for the creation of your streaming media. All of the preparation needed for online delivery will be created through this package. All the major streaming developers (Real, Microsoft and Apple) will supply software capable of this task.

You can also find excellent packages from independent companies such as Cleaner 6. Cleaner 6 will support all the recognised codecs and enable you to tweak your footage for delivery over the net.

What should I take into consideration when buying a DV camera?

The differences in DV cameras tend to be in the optics and quality of the CCDs used. A three ccd camera for (red green and blue) tends to be better than a one ccd camera. Often more expensive DV cameras do not have Firewire (or IEEE 1394) connectors and this may limit their use with your computer based editing systems.

What do I need to set up a video server?

The limiting factors for video serving tend to be the number of simultaneous connections and the amount of content. The number of connections will determine the speed of the machine overall and how many and what types of bandwidth are required. The amount of content will determine the amount of disc space required.

For more information on the three main serving technologies, please have a look at the following:

What do I need to consider when designing a network to support video delivery?

Any time-based media has different network needs to the standard uses of say transferring Word documents. The key thing to consider when designing networks is "Quality of Service", often referred to simply as QoS.

QoS is a measure of a network's performance in delivering resources over a time period. When playing a movie over the network, congestion is immediately obvious as frames are dropped or the movie stutters.

The things to consider when designing the network for video are:

How many simultaneous video streams will there be?
This will tell you what network capacity you require to handle the video traffic.
What other traffic will be present on the network?
This will allow you to plan to make sure that none of the other traffic adversely affects the video streams.

How much storage space does video take up?

The key issue for sizing online storage of video is the data rate of the footage. At the extreme, uncompressed video takes about 4 Gigabytes per second.

If you want to store near broadcast quality compressed DV then that takes approximately 10 Gigabytes per hour.

VHS quality compressed footage at say MPEG1, around 1 megabit per second, is likely to take up 500 megabytes per hour.

Playback

How can I play the films?

To play any films you download, you will need playback software, either Windows Media Player or QuickTime. Both Windows Media Player and QuickTime are available on both PC and Mac, but Windows Media Player is normally pre-installed only on PC, while QuickTime is usually pre-installed only on Macintosh computers.

In the vast majority of cases no additional software installation or configuration should be required. However, new versions of software can mean that there may be compatibility issues. If you have any problems, please contact your computer support department in the first instance.

I'm using QuickTime and my film won't play.

If you are using QuickTime to play back the films, it must be version 3 or above. This version has been available for a number of years.

I'm using Windows Media Player and there is sound but no picture.

With Windows NT and 95 you may get an error on playback whereby the audio track plays but the film does not appear. If this is the case, go to "Help" on the Windows Media Player toolbar and choose "About Windows Media Player". This will tell you the version of WMP you are running. If this is version 6.4, let a person in your computing support know that they need to install "version 7 codec for WMP" to allow playback of the films. From Windows 98 onwards all the operating systems released (ME, 2000 and XP) have the v7 codec pre-installed and will be able to play the films.

What kind of hardware specification is best?

Due to the large number of possible combinations of processor, video cards and types of machine, it is not possible to give a definitive specification. In tests, an acceptable performance was achieved on a Pentium 233 MHz processor. The activity on the network may also affect playback of the films.

The film encodings on this service are of near-VHS quality, significantly better than the "postage stamp" clips of the recent past. This emphasis on quality does mean that older machines may have problems with playback. The only way to see if your hardware is adequate is to test it.

Why is my film is playing poorly? The picture is stuttering.

Check to see what other applications you have running. Film playback needs a lot of CPU power and it may be other busy applications are taking vital CPU away from the film service. Try to have as few applications as possible open when playing films.

Your hard drive may be fragmented. Defragment your drive and try again. Contact a member of your local computing support if you are unsure how to do this.

The video card in the computer may be old; some older types of video card do not support playback of the films. Contact your local computing support if you think this may be the reason.

The film I have downloaded plays fine on my laptop but I projected it through a data projector and it looks poor or will not play.

Some older projectors do not interact well with a VGA port, particularly older models. Please contact your own computer support if this is happening.

Older laptops do not perform well with more than one screen plugged in to them at once. Try using a newer laptop to see if this makes a difference.

I have downloaded a film but it will not play although I have the correct media player installed.

Check the file associations are correct in your Macintosh or PC. Contact a member of your local computing support if you are unsure how to do this.

Why does Film & Sound Online offer downloading rather than streaming?

The JISC is still not convinced of the feasibility and efficiency of streaming large media files over the JANET network. Film & Sound Online is therefore required to deliver the films by progressive download rather than by streaming. This does not exclude the possibility, however, of an institution choosing to download films to its own server and then streaming them to authorised users over a local network.

Are there plans to deliver the films in another format in the future?

The current formats are an interim measure until an open standard, e.g. ISO MPEG4, is implemented more widely. This will allow genuinely open, cross-platform audio and video delivery including streaming but may require higher specification machines.

What are the software standards used in Film & Sound Online?

The chosen standards are:

  • QuickTime's Sorenson 2 Pro with QDesign Music.
  • Microsoft's Windows Media Player version 7
  • Frame size 352 x 288
  • Data rate average 768K bits per second (including audio track)

How can I watch a film and read about it at the same time?

Download the film or segment of your choice, saving it on your PC; go back to the Full Record page in Film & Sound Online for the film or segment you downloaded (you can use the Return button on the Download page); open the appropriate media player (Windows Media Player or QuickTime) and play the film or segment that you've saved.

Content

How was content selected?

The Managing Agent (MA) was split into two sections; Content and Rights.

Content staff based at the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) were responsible for the location and selection of material, negotiations for acquisition of audio-visual content and access to associated material, and the compilation of metadata.

Content staff were also responsible for the formation of subject-related steering groups made up of academics and industry professionals who assisted in the initial location and final selection of content.

Rights staff based at the Open University (OU) assisted content providers to identify rights, negotiate fees and work towards the clearance of material for the MAAS.

How was metadata prepared for moving images?

MAAS used an integrated rights management system and moving image metadata database based on Dublin Core Metadata standards. Based on these standards the metadata was primarily created as a resource locator. Metadata is constructed on various levels (see below). All content is assigned an ISAN code.

How is metadata structured?

Metadata is constructed on three different levels: Collection, Title and Segment.

Collection Metadata:

This includes information on the collection from which the material is sourced, e.g. The Imperial War Museum.

Title Level Metadata:

This includes information on individual titles within a collection including the name of the programme, approximate running time and year of production. A brief synopsis of the programme is also given. Details on production credits are also logged as well as relevant information if the title is part of a larger series. Details will also be provided on restricted materials (e.g. material only suitable for students studying medicine)

Segment Level Metadata:

In order to deliver moving images and sound, titles need to be cut into segments to allow ease in accessing and downloading material. Segment level metadata includes detailed descriptions of what is happening in the content. Information is also provided on segment length and where appropriate third party rights are flagged.

Is metadata permanent or can it be changed and enhanced?

All title level metadata is permanent and is encrypted with the moving image as part of the encoding process.

Segment level metadata is added to the moving image as part of the preparation for delivery. This means that segment level metadata can be added to, amended, removed and replaced, if necessary. This is extremely important, as accuracy is crucial to providing updated, current and critical information.

Terms of use

I would like to make a short film using a montage of film clips from Film & Sound Online. This would be shown during a performance at my college. The clips will not be changed in any way.

This is permitted by the terms of the licence as long as the performance is free. If your institution is charging for tickets then this would constitute a 'public' performance which is not allowed under the terms of the agreement.

Can I create, by editing, film clips that are shorter than the segments available?

Yes, this is allowed under clause 3.1.5 of the Sub-Licence: 'allow Authorised Users to take Extracts of the Licensed Works ...'

Is there a standard set of words I should use to acknowledge the source of the films if I use them in a presentation or learning materials?

There are no standard form of words, however a suggested example is:

Source: Film & Sound Online (http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk)
Title of film(s): An Introduction to Infrared Spectroscopy
Copyright: Sheffield University Learning Media Unit
Year: 1996