No; there is no such thing as "AOL Broadband files."
I was pointing out that a broadband connection (e.g., DSL or cable) is
*much* faster than dial-up. If you had a broadband connection (which
normally costs more than dial-up), then you would most likely not be
experiencing the choppiness.
If you download video files from the Internet onto your hard drive or
transfer video files from a digital camera to your hard drive, then that
means you are not streaming them live. Think of it this way: It would be
the difference between owning an entire CD and being able to play any
song from it whenever you like instead of listening to a radio station
play separate songs from that CD with a commercial (choppiness) in
between each song.
That is what streaming is. Your computer is able to play it back much
faster than your slow dial-up connection is able to feed it to you. (And
if you had a much faster broadband connection, it would be feeding it
*much* faster to your PC, you would experience little or no choppiness.)
And once you are finished viewing a streaming video file (and assuming
you later empty your folder containing all your Temporary Internet
Files), it's gone and if you want to view it again, you will need once
more to go online and watch it in all its choppy glory.
However, if you could figure out a way to download this file (rather
than merely stream it), then it will always be on your hard drive --
just like the one in your My Documents folder and you would be able to
view anytime you'd like (even if you are offline) without any problems
whatsoever.
Streamed content is not intended to be downloaded, but of course there
are ways to do this. Some files are much more difficult to download than
others, however. That is why I asked you to provide a Web link.
Different files and protocols require different downloading strategies.
Some are just too difficult for most people. Others are not so bad. And
once you download the file, you will need to make sure you have a media
player that can play that particular file (for instance, some files are
..flv files and require a player that can handle that format) and you
will also need to make sure you have the proper codec installed ("codec"
comes from "COde" and "DECode" -- the video has been encoded in a
certain way, therefore your player will need to decode it; if the proper
codec is installed, this is all done automatically).
I hope your head isn's spinning too much!
If you still want to give this a crack, let's start by having you
provide the Web link and the name of the file you would like to try to
download.
Or.....
Spend more money and get a broadband connection.
