What's wrong with these videos?

[Guest letterman@invalid.com]

I wanted to re-watch a few of the funny Superbowl commercials and save

my favorites to my own drive. I wanted to be sure they were in .FLV

format, because Media Player seems to always want me to upgrade and do

this and do that, and is just plain annoying, and seems to be getting

worse every year. I dont use Quicktime or RealPlayer, both which seem

to be fading.

 

Anyhow, right after the game I went to YouTube.com and found it had a

message saying it was experiencing problems (probably overloaded due

to the Superbowl ending). So, I went to ifilm.com, knowing they

always have the SB commercials.

 

The first commercial I went for was the Budweiser Clydesdale horse

one. (My favorite this year). I loaded Firefox, and opened that

video. I should note that because I am on a dialup connection, I let

the whole file download to my cache before I play it. I let it load

on my computer, and started to play it inside a Firefox window. I

could not even stand listening to the sound. It was all broken up.

The picture was a little jerky, but not too bad, but the sound was so

chopped up, I had to shut my speakers off.

 

I saved the file from cache to a permanently saved .FLV file. I

closed all other software to conserve resources. I played the saved

file using my FLV viewer. SAME THING. The sound was horrible.

 

Thinking this was just that one commercial with a defective file, I

downloaded several more of the other commercials. ALL the commercials

from Ifilm.com were horrible, particularly the sound.

 

By this time, Youtube was fixed and working again. I downloaded the

exact same commercials, and they play flawlessly, both within Firefox

and using my own FLV player after saving the file.

 

I will say that the viewing window is a bit smaller on Youtube, and

the file size (when I save them), is smaller. But I can enlarge them

from Youtube and they still work fine.

 

I am wondering if the commercials on ifilm.com are intentionally

screwed up as some form of anti-copying thing, or is there some

special code added to those on ifilm? I never have problems with the

FLV files on Youtube.

 

Anyone have any ideas or comments what might be going on. If anyone

wants to try them, the one I tested on both is the one where the horse

pulls the train. (Budweiser).

Thanks in advance.

 

By the way - MY SYSTEM is:

I'm using Win98SE on a IBM Net Vista Pentium3 / 1GHZ computer with

370megs Ram and plenty of drive space. The video and sound cards are

built in to the motherboard. They work fine most of the time.