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"What format are your satellite movies in?"
"How do you play your FLI and JAVA movies?"

We have two different formats for our satellite image movies within the CIMSS Tropical Cyclone page; FLI and JAVA. We decided on these types of movies for many reasons :

  • 1. They are, in general, a universal movie format,
  • 2. They can be played easily with most systems and/or browers,
  • 3. They are easy for us to make, and
  • 4. They have a good appearance.

    FLI-format movies can be played on most systems. Information on obtaining FLI movie players and how to configure your system to play these movies can be found here. FLI movies are larger than the MPEG movies we used to offer (most of our archived movies are in MPEG format), but we found FLI movies to look better and we had more control over the playing of the movies using FLI players.

    JAVA-format movies are also offered to those people who have JAVA compatable web browsers (newer versions of Netscape). JAVA allows you to look at a loop without having to download any special software to view the movie. Plus, it is easy for us to maintain (the individual FLI images are in GIF format also, so we don't have redundant imagery in two different formats).