Help - Audio and Visual Tips

If you can't view some of our way cool images

Please upgrade to a browser which supports inline GIF/JPEGs! Some great browsers include:

Windows, Mac or Unix users: Netscape
OS/2 users: Netscape for Windows, or IBM WebExplorer

Netscape appears to be better (nothaving to wait until a page is completely loaded to click on a link) but isn't a native OS/2 application.

Browsers that are more challenging to install and support inline GIF/JPEGs are include

Chimera (Unix),
Emacs W3-mode.
List of Browers

Hearing Silicon Surf Audio Tracks

To play most audio files on Windows, you need Wham(ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/.3/net/infosys/Win-Mosaic/viewers/) or Cool(ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/cica/sounds/)

To play most audio files on a Mac, you need SoundMachine

On a Unix machine, you need socks(ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/audio/). For Help with your mailcap see sample

Seeing SGI's Radical Animation Clips

On Windows, you'll probably need Quicktime for Windows (ftp://ftp.earthlink.net/pub/software/PC/ViewersForMosaic/) and a MPEG player.

On a X11/Unix machine, you will need a MPEG player , and the other formats (including quicktime+audio!) can probably be handled by xanim. Be sure to have this line in your mailcap file:

        video/*; xanim +Ca +CF4 -Cn %s
	video/*; movieplayer -f %s

If the full-size images are not well rendered

If you download a full-size image, be sure to view it from an application able to access a full 256-color custom colormap. This is not a problem when using 24bit TrueColor displays, however common hardware does not permit it and has a total number of allocable colors of 256.

Example: Mosaic for X111/Unix usually spawns xv as image viewer, so the colors of the images may get distorted. For xv version 3, you need to add special flags, such as "-perfect -8" (forget "-8" if you are using xv version 2) so that xv can allocate colors as necessary. Your Mosaic mailcap should read:

        image/*; xv -8 -slow24 -perfect %s

Where is the mailcap on Unix machines?

Netscape users: from the Options menu, select Preferences, then Helper Applications. The mailcap file should hide around /usr/local/lib/netscape/mailcap or /etc/mailcap on SGI.

You can override it with the file $HOME/.mailcap. Here's mine:

audio/x-wav; sox -t .wav - -t .au - | xplay -forkoff -; stream-buffer-size=8000
audio/*; xplay -forkoff -; stream-buffer-size=8000
video/*; xanim +Ca +CF4 -Cn %s
application/postscript; ghostview %s
application/x-dvi; xdvi %s

If all else fail...

Please note the URL references within Silicon Surf and send your comments to webmaster@sgi.com Remember that remote troubleshooting is difficult at best. There are many local reasons for downloading troubles, such as your system setup and your network connection. If you are having trouble and are using a Silicon Graphics system please checkout our Support Advantage program.

We welcome feedback and comments at webmaster@www.sgi.com.