A mouse just told me that all the talks from the International Conference on Topological and Geometric Graph Theory, just held in Paris, are available online. Nearly a full day of video, when you put it all together.

Sadly, you'll need a Windows PC to view it all. It's in Windows Media format, and a more recent version of Windows Media than will run with the last version of the browser plugin available for OS X. And it's a streaming video so it's not obvious to me how to download the files and run them through VLC instead. Let alone somehow get them onto my new big iPod...

The rigamarole needed to get this working on a Mac:

  1. Go to http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv_download.htm and download and install the WMV components described there.

  2. Go to the video you want, and click on the "Voir la vidéo" button. If you have correctly installed the WMV components you should see the starting frame of the movie rather than a broken plugin (in Firefox or Camino), but it still won't play within the browser, and you still won't see anything useful in Safari.

  3. Click on the "client Linux" link in the top right corner. It should pop up another window (you have enabled pop-ups, right?) with an "mms:..." link within it.

  4. Run Applications>Flip4Mac>WMV Player (installed in step 1), which will run Quicktime Player, or just run Quicktime Player yourself.

  5. Use Quicktime Player's "open URL..." command (cmd-U), carefully select the text of the url in the popup window, and copy and paste into Quicktime Player's dialog box.

  6. Press the play button.

Rather annoying compared to e.g. Youtube, in which one can just press play in a browser and have it work, but not completely impossible...




Comments:

leonardo_m:
2008-05-28T14:17:01Z

Media must be in the more open format as possible.

11011110:
2008-05-28T14:19:46Z

I agree. I am encouraged by the trend of recording talks and making them available for anyone to view later, though — that's a lot more open than not doing so.

None: Save files locally
2008-05-28T14:56:03Z

They have provided an mms:// url. The mplayer on my ubuntu machine was able to display the videos perfectly. Therefore, using mencoder to locally save the videos should be possible.

None: Re: Save files locally
2008-05-28T15:03:35Z

To be more precise, this works nice:

mplayer -dumpstream mms://mediaWM01.cines.fr/3517/windows/canalu/colloques/2008/0519_TGGT/tggt-ens-20080520-am1_200508_pach.wmv

to download the Pach talk for example.

11011110: Re: Save files locally
2008-05-28T15:25:05Z

Ok, I tried using MPlayer OS X, with "Open location..." and that URL. It sped up the audio so that Janos was talking in a Mickey Mouse voice and didn't show the video. And I don't see an option to dump the movie to disk so that I can try running it through some other program.

Anyone have links to a working solution for OS X? You'd think that what works in Linux will work in OS X because they're both Unix underneath, but it's not always true.

None: Re: Save files locally
2008-05-28T15:34:51Z

check out Flip4Mac, i'm watching this video in quicktime right now, no fanciness required.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Flip4Mac

Cheers,

- Ryan
www.ryanlewis.net

11011110: Re: Save files locally
2008-05-28T15:38:18Z

Thanks, I'll try it.

None: Re: Save files locally
2008-06-04T03:55:53Z

P.S. by setting the options properly with Flip4Mac, you literally don't have to do anything, my version automatically opens quicktime, and starts playing, there is no button pushing. Look for Flip4Mac in the System Preferences after it is installed and mess around a bit.

None: Re: Save files locally
2008-05-29T19:28:24Z

I think that if you ran mplayer from the command-line (terminal), then you could use the command I wrote in the previous post.

None: Re: Save files locally
2008-05-28T16:23:51Z

I actually had no problem playing this right on the web site with my Ubunutu (7.04) release in Firefox (2.0.0.14)... totem (2.18.1) picked it up perfectly!

Thanks for the link, I'll have to find one that interests me a bit later!

None: VLC
2008-05-30T08:44:36Z

Did you try vlc (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)? It is far more robust than mplayer!..

11011110: Re: VLC
2008-05-30T14:16:58Z

Duh. No. I have VLC but it didn't occur to me that it would handle network streams. It does. Not really any fewer steps than the eventual Quicktime Player solution, but it works well.