Using the Site

We hope your experience with the site is a pleasant one. However, if you experience difficulties, these links may help you get back on track.

• Troubleshooting
• Plug-Ins

TROUBLESHOOTING

These quick hints may help solve problems using the site:

Media Players

ARTSEDGE audio and video clips appear in two forms: the RealOne Player or a dedicated MediaPlayer designed to embed multimedia content in a special template. The latter uses RealMedia for streaming the audio and video you see, but will not spawn the familiar RealPlayer window, instead loading it into a custom player.

If you have difficulty with the clips, please review the following:

• Are you using a recent version of RealPlayer? You will need RealPlayer 8.5 or above to use our clips. If you are using an earlier version of RealPlayer 8, you will not be able to use the media clips; you must download a recent version. Please note that RealPlayer is FREE; you may wish to contact your network administrator before downloading.
• Are you using AOL Media Player? If so, you will not be able to load the audio/video clips in some circumstances. Our clips are backwards-compliant to Real version G2; however, in some cases, AOL's dedicated Media Player cannot load the clips (resulting in a "corrupted file" message.) Please use RealOne to use the media clips, or upgrade your AOL player to the latest version.
• Are you on a modem line? If so, your media, especially video, may be jerky and could stop altogether. This is often due to network congestion and other factors beside your system settings. In most instances, the clip will resume after a brief delay.
• Are you noticing different quality on different machines? Our clips are designed to detect the stream that your system can handle and deliver that stream only. If you are on a fast network, your experience will be different from modem users.

Browsers

This site has been optimized for the Internet Explorer browser, for screens at 800x600 display. Some portions of the site use Dynamic HTML (DHTML) for all scrolling content and for navigation. If you are having difficulty with the page layouts, check for the following:

• Are you running the most recent version of your browser? New (4.5 and above) versions are most compatable with this technology and will perform best.
• Are you using Netscape? This browser often renders pages differently than others, including smaller fonts and different spacing of page layout. The pages were designed using Internet Explorer 5.0 as the primary browser; statistics show most ARTSEDGE users are visiting with this version.

PLUG-INS

The ARTSEDGE site uses a limited number of "plug-ins", generally for multimedia content.You may need to download one by visiting the site provider--users on school networks or with firewalls or other security restrictions may need assistance from their network administrators.

  Adobe Acrobat Reader allows you to view—and easily print—PDF documents, like our handouts and Cuesheets.

  RealPlayer "streams" audio and video files, so they do not have to download to your computer before playing. We use this for the majority of our multimedia content.

  Flash allows visitors to experience interactive multimedia—including audio, video and animations—through a Web browser. We use Flash 6.