PATSy requires a Web browser that supports JavaScript, as all modern browsers do. For example, any Firefox browser or Internet Explorer from version 4.x will work.

You will be expected to be able to play Quicktime movies and AIFF audio files. There are applications and/or browser plug-ins on all major platforms to play these files. If you can play this movie, this movie (streaming) and this audio file you're okay. If not, please take a look at your browser's help pages. Quicktime Player for Mac and Quicktime Player for Windows can be downloaded (free) from Apple's Quicktime download site.

Finally, a direct internet connection (i.e. not via a modem) is recommended for optimal performance. You should be able to get some flavour of the system without this, but you may find it frustratingly slow, especially for the video and audio downloads.

Notes on Video

Many PATSy movies are now provided in Quicktime format. Quicktime 3 is the default format. Streaming Quicktime versions of video is also provided in some cases and we anticipate moving exclusively to streaming video in due course.

In order to play streaming video you will need Quicktime version 5 or later. To set up your system, run the QuickTime 5 Player, and select Edit-->Preferences-->QuickTime Preferences from the menus. You should select Streaming Transport from the pulldown menu, and set it to use HTTP Port 80. This will allow you to circumvent the firewall restrictions that are in place at many academic sites.

Notes on Audio

For detailed phonetic analysis of the PATSy audio clips, we recommend a tool called Praat. This is a fully featured, and truly cross-platform tool, which is available free. You need to email Paul Boersma for the address of the download page. You may already have a tool in mind which you'd like to use for playing audio: you will need to change your browser's helper applications to achieve this.

The ideal behaviour for both audio and video is for your browser to start an external application to play the clip, and also to stop multiple instantiations of the application running at the same time. This is likely to be a problem more accutely felt for audio than video, simply because there are many times more audio than video clips on PATSy. In order to solve the problem you may need to change your helper application for AIFF files.

PC troubleshooting

You want Quicktime to play video but you may need to prevent Quicktime from playing audio only files (eg AIFF audio clips). Do this by running the Quicktime Player application, select Edit menu --> Preferences --> Registration. A panel will be presented - click on the button labelled Registration and a drop down menu will appear. Select Browser Plug-in and then click MIME Settings. At this point the procedures for Quicktime 4 and 5 differ:

Quicktime 4: A panel will appear headed with statement Please select the MIME types you would like the Quicktime plug-in to handle - below it is a list of file types - click on each of the 'aiff' file types so that the plus (+) sign next to them disappears (PCs) or the check box becomes unchecked (Macs). Leave all other MIME types unaltered.

Quicktime 5: A panel will appear that states Please select the MIME types that you would like Quicktime to handle. Configure the Audio only file formats to Do not use Quicktime and leave the other settings as they are.

The following applies only to those using very old Internet Explorer versions (5.5 SP2 or 6 for Windows)

If you have been experiencing problems playing Quicktime clips that you haven't been able to resolve then you may need to obtain the ActiveX control as described at the Apple quicktime developers' site: