Having problems?

Macs with OS 10.5 (LEOPARD)

Macs with OS 10.5 (Leopard) appear to have problems with the Flash media content in Issue 1 of the magazine, and people find the media goes all white and says "buffering ..." indefinitely. This starts with the cover, which is a Flash media movie.

Issue 1 does work well on OS 10.4 (Tiger), so consider yourself lucky if you are still back on the older OS.

If you are using OS 10.5 (Leopard), then you need to download the STANDARD Edition.

Using Preview on a MAC is a NO-NO with EMBEDDED Edition

MRH Issue 1 EMBEDDED Edition uses some interactive PDF techniques and plain old Preview on a Mac just can't handle it. You need to download and install Adobe Reader 9 or greater in order to read the EMBEDDED Edition of MRH on a Mac with OS 10.5 (Leopard).

The EMBEDDED Edition can be made to work on Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) using Adobe Reader 9 with a little tweaking - see this thread for details.

The latest version of the STANDARD Edition should be viewable on newer Macs just with Preview. If you have an older Mac and Preview just isn't working for you, download and install Adobe Reader 7 or greater (Adobe 8 appears to be the oldest version Adobe has for Macs - Adobe 7 is still available for PCs from Adobe).

ADOBE READER 9 is required for the EMBEDDED Edition

The EMBEDDED Edition of MRH Issue 1 requires Adobe Reader 9 in order for everything to work right when viewing the mediaZine. If you try any other version and something doesn't work right, well, we told you what you needed to use!

You can get by with using Adobe Reader 7 or greater with the STANDARD Edition.

FLASH 9+ is required for issues prior to #8

You'll need a fairly new version of the Flash Player installed - click here to check which version you have installed. The first digit needs to be 9 or greater.

In a couple of cases, the Flash Player version was good (9+) but people still had problems getting many of the movies in the mediaZine to play. We found if they uninstalled their Flash Player, rebooted, and installed the latest version of Flash Player fresh, it solved their problem.

It also appears that on PCs you need to install the Flash Player using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox or some other browser. Using IE to install Flash Player appears to get all the pieces installed on Windows PCs properly so Flash will work well - Firefox and other browsers appear to miss installing some pieces if you want Flash to play inside a rich media PDF like MRH.

The STANDARD Edition plays the rich media content in a web browser instead of inside the PDF. We've found the web brower to be more reliable for Flash Player media, so if the EMBEDDED Edition is giving you trouble, try downloading the STANDARD Edition instead.

QUICKTIME 7.6+ is required

You need to make sure you have Quicktime 7.6+ installed to play some of the rich media content in MRH. You can check that quicktime is working okay on your machine by clicking here. Next, check which version you have by following the steps outlined here - you need to be running at least Quicktime 7.6 for all the rich media goodies in MRH to work properly. If it turns out you need to install a newer version of Quicktime, you can download it from here.

The STANDARD Edition plays the rich media content in a web browser instead of inside the PDF. We've found the web brower to be more reliable for Quicktime media, so if the EMBEDDED Edition is giving you trouble, try downloading the STANDARD Edition instead.

If you're on dial up, here's an option

The full rich media EMBEDDED Edition of Model Railroad Hobbyist is generally 100+ MB, which will be a 6+ hour download for people on dial up. While downloading a 100+ MB file on broadband is pretty fast (less than 10 minutes typically), on dialup it can be excruciating!

With a download manager, you can schedule the download to take place over night, and if it dies part way through, you can resume it where it left off!

Here's our list of recommended FREE Download Managers:

PCs: FreeDownloadManager

MACs: FOLX

LINUX: DownThemAll (Firefox Plugin)

This last download manager - DownThemAll - is a free Firefox plugin that runs on any computer that can run the Firefox browser.

By using one of these download managers on dialup, you can start the download when you go to bed and get up in the morning with your magazine ready to go! If the download died, just fire it up again where it left off before you go to work and when you come home the rest of your download should have finished and you're all set.

Using one of these download managers is a lifesaver for large file downloads on a dial up internet connection - and they're rather handy even on broadband!

If all else fails, EMAIL support

If you tried everything here and you still can't get it to work, email support and we'll do our best to get something to work for you.