Position of Background Images/HTML

[Mary]

Blair,

First of all, many thanks for your assistance.

Okay, here's an update. Putting the DPI to large settings seems to have helped a great deal. When I used the external monitor to my laptop, I could get things to work okay.

Today I went into the lab and at first noticed some wonky kind of spacing issues, but I reset all of the lab computers to large DPI and it seemed to help. I had to adjust the spacing to deal with the monitors, but I think that's ultimately due to the fact that I'm working on wide-screen (pretty much) from home and from my office, and the monitors at school aren't that. That I understand.

Here's one issue that I continue to be confused about -- the placement of video. So if I specify a question as a video item (with no parameters), then the video appears in the upper left-hand corner (though not absolutely so). So it's at about 25% down and 15% from the left -- or therebouts. I thought it was supposed to be centered?

So here's my temporary work around. I convered my avi videos to flash and embedded them into a webpage. Then I used a webpage (with the % locations) to position in the video (with a webpage used as a background image). The flash video in the webpage is in the upper-left hand corner. This seemed to work both at in our lab and at home. So that would be the workaround that I would use.

Ultimately, the dodgy position associated with just using a movie file has led me to suspect (perhaps mistakenly so), that there's something up with the medialab-media player thing. Does media player mess with stuff? I don't know. I'm guessing at this point. But here's a potential hint. I noticed in the manual that when the height/width of a video is specified, then the video will appear at the upper-left hand margin. Well, I thought I was at full size, but I hadn't specified it. So to approximate it, I set it at h.99. At that point it was fully in the upper left position. So might medialab be resizing the image somehow? In other words, might media player video be centered, but the video it plays is not because it's not positioned right? This is my guess, but what do I know.

In case it's relevant, these are videos that I downloaded from youtube. I used dvdvideosoft to do it (freeware). I was going to try this, too, on a video that I created from converting from a VHS, but to be honest, I just ran out of time. This &*($ job is getting in my way of having fun with this program.

Thanks again for any insight you can provide.

Best,

mbo