In order to watch any video promoted on this side, you need three things: the codec and/or a player that supports this codec and the correct p2p-software. This may sound a bit complicated, but after investing some minutes, you'll see that it is worth it: there is no better way to encode, distribute and decode digital video material across platforms. Even though the current state of the development may still appear a little unstable and not as comfortable as you might be used to, this is the only option so that all people can watch and produce videofiles - no matter on which platform they work on and without them having to pay insane fees for software (or having to fear to pay for the software later).

Codec

All V2V video has been encoded with ogg theora, the first free open source and platform independent multimedia codec. If you want to produce and encode video material using this codec, get the latest version from the ffmpeg2theora Project. It's an command line based application that works fine on all major operating systems (Linux, MacosX, Windows).

In order to watch the ogg theora encoded files on Mac OS X or Windows, you should install the Videolan VLC player. Since October 2004 there is a stable release that supports the ogg theora multimedia codec. For Linux users the most popular player to use is mplayer.

PLAYERS

Windows: The most common solution is VLC: Download, unpack, drag and drop the application to your desired place. Open the player first, then open the video file out of the player. If you try to double-click just the oggtheora file, it might not be recognized unless you configured your system to do so.

Mac OS X: We strongly recommend VLC: Download the binaries and then all you need to do is to drag and drop the VLC player icon to your Applications folder and everything will be fine.

Linux: Use MPlayer or choose precompiled binaries of VLC for various linux flavors.

A list of all players that support theora can be found here

DISTRIBUTION

We distribute all V2V video material via a peer2peer software: Bit Torrent is a very comfortable and stable client, that also enables you to pause the download as many times as you need to, without having to start over and over again. This is how it works:

1. Download and install Bit Torrent from the BitTorrent download page - there you also find descriptions and help.

After you installed Bit Torrent, all you need to do is

2. Get the torrent file: a small file that you download from this page. After downloading, just double click and it will start the Bit Torrent application which connects you to all available servers or peers with whom you can then share the video file. Again, this can be started and stopped as often as you like.