About These Video Clips

The Codec

I can't treat everyone as being knowledgeable of computers and related fields. So, respectfully, for those that don't know what this is all about regarding these downloads, please read the following:

Codecs are special software tools, particularly relevant to AVI video files. Codec stands for COmpressor/DECompressor, and such software is used to compress or decompress, at the client end, specific multimedia files such as video and audio. This is necessary when needing to deal with manageable sized files over the Internet. In order to view these files you will need a codec to decompress the AVI videos in the same way I have compressed them. To better understand why compression is necessary - if I were to provide these clips in their raw, uncompressed state, they would take you perhaps days to download with a traditional 56K modem.

I am using the 'Angel Potion  MPEG 4 v1' codec. It's performance is certainly adequate for my purposes. While delivering crisp fast motion sequences with little drop out, it does, I have noticed, become momentarily a little unstable when a sequences displays high intensity brightness in the larger canvas resolutions. I had originally captured all these clips in a 452X340 format, so they could be played full screen. But I found the playback a bit shaky and unstable on lower spec machines. Any such flaw is barely noticeable at a still perfectly adequate 320x240. I think I can safely guarantee your system will play these clips without a problem - a higher the system spec the better the performance, ie an AGP video card and fast CPU etc.

These clips were captured (back in 2001) using the Hauppauge WIN TV-GO capture card, on a Windows 98 SE platform, using an Athlon 900 machine, with 256 MB of P-133 SDRAM. Older, slower machines will still be able to play these captured clips. Pentium I machines for example shouldn't have a problem, but playback may suffer momentary audio lag, pixel  judder, drop out and other artefacts, but this is unlikely as these clips are niether system intensive due to their screen size, and Angel Potion has performed reasonably well in these instances. As I said, I had originally captured these at a much larger size, but encountered a degraded performance when viewing the playback on a other machines, lower in spec. For testing purposes I tried running them on other machines. After analysis, I can guarantee an adequate playback performance on machines with at least the following parameters:

They have also been played back on my old Cyrix 266 machine, which had 64 MB SDRAM, with a standard 8 MB PCI video card. I found the performance endured noticeable degradation in quality in some areas, but playback was acceptable. If you have concerns over your machine's potential to successfully run these clips, all you can do is download them and see.

You can view these clips with any movie player capable of playing AVI files. These were first played on my old machine with Microsoft Media Player version 6.4.07. This player comes with Microsoft's MPEG 4 codec. Apple's QuickTime also supports Microsoft AVI's.

You may indeed already have the Angel Potion codec installed. If you don't know if this is so, or you are unsure of what codecs you may have on your system, follow these steps (for Windows users) to view your installed codecs.

From the Start Menu click > Settings > Control Panel. Select the Multimedia icon and hit the Devices tab. Once inside double click Video Compression Codecs. If Angel Potion MS MPEG-4 v1 is not in the list you will have to download it. Please bear with me, it is very simple: 

Downloading the codec

After receiving numerous emails from people having trouble locating this codec on the web, I decided to simply upload it to my site for you to download. Here it is:

Angelpotion Codec (774K)

The Angel Potion codec is easy to install. After downloading it (as a zip file) you will have to run an executable file of only a few hundred Kilobytes.

ON TO THE CLIPS