GRC | Steve & GRC on Television

We have been privileged to build a terrific relationship with ZD/TechTV.

Through the years, Steve has been invited to share his
work, software, and thinking with Leo Laporte, Jim
Louderback, and other TechTV personalities.

Windows Media Format

After extensive experimentation, research, and consideration, we have chosen to provide our A/V content in downloadable WMV (Windows Media Video) format.

The following factors contributed to our decision:

	Technical Excellence — Real Networks was the original innovator in this category and thus had a natural early lead. But thanks to the development and adoption of the next-generation, emerging, high-quality MPEG-4 standard, Microsoft's technology has caught up and the Version 6.4 Windows Media Player can decode and play MPEG-4 video. In our testing, when carefully tuned, no other media encoding technology outperformed this system. We have hand-tuned our encoding to generate less than two megabytes per minute of video, while producing absolutely acceptable image size and quality. (By employing some "bitrate averaging" tricks.)
	Free and Built into Windows — Most people will already have a media player that's capable of playing these videos. Those who don't may freely download a compatible player from Microsoft's web site. Any Media Player — from version 6.4 on — will be able to play these videos. We like version 6.4 because it has much less "fluff" than version 7. Version 7 has been widely — and deservedly — criticized for its amazing amount of typical "Microsoft bloat".
	Non-Streaming File Downloads — We are not fans of streaming for video archives. It seems to us that with today's huge hard drives, there is no reason not to download a video locally once — no matter how long it may take over your connection — then play it, with reasonable quality, as many times as you wish. This approach is much more modem-friendly. Also, the best overall video quality is obtained by employing variable bitrate encoding which allows high-motion scenes to use more bits than low-motion scenes. This is not something that can be done with fixed-rate streaming video. As a result, streaming makes sense for live content like news, weather, and sports, but not for video archives like this one.
	Unfortunately, Real Networks is Evil — We inherently identify with, and root for, the little guy, therefore Real Networks was once our favored choice. So it's sad and unfortunate that time and time again Real Networks demonstrates active contempt for the privacy rights of their products' users. They spy every way they can on their users' activities. There is NO WAY we would ever have any of their junk on our systems and we would never recommend their use to anyone.

Creating Your Own Video Clips — Beware CleanerXL!

We receive many inquiries about the tools and techniques used for the creation of these small yet high-quality clips, as well as support for MPEG format videos. Once we have added MPEG format we will detail the steps and settings required.

Significantly, they were ALL created with FREE, downloadable, utilities!

Under the mistaken belief that we might be able to get the best MPEG results with commercial software, we unfortunately spent $1100 for Discreet's Cleaner and MPEG Charger. STAY AWAY FROM THIS SOFTWARE! Not only did it turn out to be a very bad port of a Macintosh-based system (which crashes Windows and barely functions), they REFUSE to accept responsibility for this and will not accept its return (the day after it arrived) so we are stuck with an expensive mistake.

Check Your Media Player

Since we encoded these audio/video clips with Microsoft's version 7 compression technology, your system will need to have a version 7 decompressor installed in order to view them. If it doesn't already have one, it is easily added.

To determine if any updates are needed:

Download the test video — We created a short test video to verify your system's ability to play the full-size videos:

	"Right click" on the image below and . . .
	With Internet Explorer choose "Save Target As..." to download and save the file into your computer.
	With Netscape Navigator choose "Save Link As..." to download and save the file into your computer.
	Be sure to make note of where the file is saved within your computer so you can locate and run it after it's downloaded. Placing it on your system desktop is often convenient.

You should probably not attempt to "Left click" and view the file with your browser, especially if you have a low bandwidth Internet connection:

Right-Click on this image to
download 282KB test video.

Run the test video — Double-click on the WMV video file to attempt to run it with your system's media player. One of the following things will happen:

	The test video plays without trouble — Great!! Your system is ready to play any of the videos on this page. You may scroll down to browse through our audio and video clip archive . . .
	Media player needs updating — Your media player may say that it needs to download some updated files from Microsoft in order to play this video. Depending upon your preferences and your local security and personal firewall settings, you may choose to do this. If so, proceed to give Media Player permission to update itself, then re-run the test video. Alternatively, if — for whatever reason — you prefer not having your computer and media player contact Microsoft, you can update your system with version 7 codecs using this file, which you may download from our server: Windows Media Version 7 Codec (690 kb) After downloading the file, run it to update your system. However you choose to proceed, re-run the test video to verify that your system is able to play version 7 WMV video files.
	Your system doesn't recognize the WMV file — If your system doesn't know what to do with the WMV file type, please see the next item (3) for help installing a compatible Windows media player.

Install Windows Media Player — If your system does not recognize the WMV (Windows Media Video) file type, you may need to install or update your Windows Media Player. The Windows Media "Download Center" page on Microsoft's site contains a collection of download links. We recommend that you install version 6.4 unless you're a person who likes lots of non-functional and superfluous bells and whistles, in which case version 7 is definitely for you!:

Windows Media Download Center

If you are a Netscape user who dislikes Internet Explorer, you may need to use a non-IE version of Media Player (don't ask us why Media Player cares about your web browser . . . but it does.) You can find all available versions of Media Player on the following page:

Other Released Media Player Versions

Our Audio & Video Archives

Once you have verified your ability to play the test video above, you may download any of the following files with a reasonable assurance of being able to view the resulting video.

Remember to first download the file from our site rather than "running it" directly from your browser. (Probably by right-clicking your mouse on any of the images or highlighted links below.)

You WILL experience a 20-second buffering delay when you play any of these videos. We employed some tricky video encoding to yield the highest quality in the smallest file size. A side effect of our use of an overly large "bit rate averaging window" is a delay in playback startup . . . but the improved quality justifies the delay.

We also provide the much smaller audio tracks for each video, in MPEG-1 LAYER-3 (MP3) format, if that's all you want.

Also note that these are organized in chronological order, oldest first, newest last. So if you are looking for the latest stuff please scroll to the bottom.

Click of Death & Trouble In Paradise
Steve meets Leo Laporte for the first time to discuss the Click of Death and "Trouble In Paradise" (TIP). Iomega's David Hellier later joins them by telephone.		June 17, 1998 Screensavers on ZDTV Playing Time: 12:56 WMV Video: 21.3 MB MP3 Audio: 3.0 MB

Steve and Leo discuss Steve's further research into Click Death and demonstrate Steve's "Trouble In Paradise" (TIP) freeware.		November 06, 1998 Screensavers on ZDTV Playing Time: 09:13 WMV Video: 15.3 MB MP3 Audio: 2.1 MB

ShieldsUP! & Internet Security
The Screensaver's Kate Botello independently discovers ShieldsUP! and introduces it for the first time to Leo and the Screensaver's audience.		November 20, 1999 Screensavers on ZDTV Playing Time: 04:22 WMV Video: 7.4 MB MP3 Audio: 1.0 MB

On "Call for Help", Leo and a Netcam caller discuss Internet security, hacking, Trojans, file sharing, and ShieldsUP!		December 09, 1999 Call for Help on ZDTV Playing Time: 04:39 WMV Video: 7.9 MB MP3 Audio: 1.1 MB

Several months later, Steve hangs out with Leo on his "Call for Help" show discussing Internet security and ShieldsUP!		March 02, 2000 Call for Help on ZDTV Playing Time: 09:21 WMV Video: 15.5 MB MP3 Audio: 2.2 MB

PatchWork, LeakTest & NetFilter
The Screensaver's Leo Laporte and Steve discuss his recent security and privacy work: PatchWork, LeakTest, and NetFilter.		April 09, 2001 Screensavers on TechTV Playing Time: 05:32 WMV Video: 9.3 MB MP3 Audio: 1.2 MB

Web Surfing Security & Privacy
TechTV's Steve Abrams and Jim Louderback interview Steve about concerns and solutions for web surfing privacy.		April 10, 2001 TechLive on TechTV Playing Time: 05:23 WMV Video: 9.3 MB MP3 Audio: 1.2 MB

Our Distributed Denial of Service Attack
Steve joins TechTV's Leo Laporte by satellite to discuss the May 4th & 5th, 2001, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on GRC.COM.		May 09, 2001 TechLive on TechTV Playing Time: 05:15 WMV Video: 8.7 MB MP3 Audio: 1.2 MB

Windows XP and Raw Socket Access
Before Windows XP was completed, Steve made one last plea to Microsoft to restrict Windows XP's user access to full raw sockets.		August 15, 2001 TechLive on TechTV Playing Time: 04:03 WMV Video: 6.9 MB MP3 Audio: 0.9 MB

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Gibson Research Corporation is owned and operated by Steve Gibson. The contents
of this page are Copyright (c) 2014 Gibson Research Corporation. SpinRite, ShieldsUP,
NanoProbe, and any other indicated trademarks are registered trademarks of Gibson
Research Corporation, Laguna Hills, CA, USA. GRC's web and customer privacy policy.

Last Edit: Jul 01, 2005 at 18:48 (3,529.58 days ago)

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