Line conditioners

Most people will have a used a power strip with a surge protector at some point - this will shut off an electrical current when the power becomes too high.

If you are setting up audio-visual equipment in a courtroom or other building with an older electrical system it may be wise to also use a line (or power) conditioner which will control the voltage which hardware receives. More modern electrical systems will have line conditioners built-in, but many older facilities will lack them.

Low voltage dips will put stress on electrical devices and cause them to fail. A line conditioner will keep the voltage with a safe range.

A typical line conditioner will look like this model:

The power cords from multiple laptops, printers, and other devices can be plugged into the line conditioner, and the line conditioner's power cord will be plugged to a wall outlet.

The line conditioner should have warning lights which indicate when the power is too high or too low.

Avoid a surprise start in VLC Media Player

The widely used, free to download video player, VLC Media Player has an odd quirk. Its default settings will flash the media title after the video is first opened.

This title will disappear after a few moments whether pause is pressed or not, but it can obscure closed captions or other text or images on the video. This will be an unpleasant surprise when video files are shown at a trial as evidence, or as a visual aid at client meetings.

Under Tools . . . Preferences, be sure to uncheck 'Show media title on video start'. Note that the media title will not necessarily be the same as the file name.

Proxy Settings in Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player's ability to play online content can be affected by the proxy settings in the application's Options. The proxy settings allow for a program to manage the connection between a web browser and another computer.

If you are having trouble playing online video with Media Player check the proxy settings under Organize . . . Options on the Network tab. You will see that both HTTP and RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) can be used. RTSP differs from HTTP in that it has to retain a session state from a prior request. It cannot understand each request by itself. While RTSP was designed for online video, not all systems can use it.

RTSP will connect to a server and stream video. HTTP will download the media over the internet, delivering the files over web servers. In the Configure setting you can set Media Player to autodetect proxy settings for online video, rather than using the proxy settings of the web browser.