A Techie Question

[Jennifer Piersol]

Hey, Penny.  Glad to hear that Elizabeth went back to sleep. ;)  I'm 
having trouble getting Ginger to sleep at the moment - but then, 
she's a little over 2 1/2, so we have taken to calling it "quiet 
time" and making her play quietly in her room.

Anyway, to your question:

Like Martin previously said, both RealPlayer and Quicktime are free, 
and both have "pay" versions that have more bells and whistles.  
Occasionally, when you load one of the free ones up, it'll ask you if 
you want to "upgrade" to the full versions, but it's not necessary, 
even if it can get a little annoying.


Personally, I don't like RealPlayer.  The quality of the movies are 
quite bad, and I tend to have many problems with buffering and such - 
even though I have DSL and *really* good download speeds.  However, I 
must concede (sp?) that there are some clips that you just can't 
watch unless you have RealPlayer.

Quicktime is *wonderful* for downloading video clips.  Using a fairly 
ontopic example, I download the HP movie trailers in Quicktime, and 
the quality is always nearly perfect.  I've never had a buffering 
problem with them, and I've never had a mismatched picture/sound 
problem with Quicktime - but I have with both RealPlayer and Windows 
Media Player.

Hope this helps - I suppose that I would agree with Martin that both 
are useful, but I'm going to go one step further and express a 
preference for Quicktime... especially if you have limited space and 
can only do one at the moment.  Most clips tend to be available in 
Quicktime as Mac/Apple users are most likely to have a player for it.

Jen