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F A Q

Questions: Why do you almost exclusively feature US aircraft videos? What about British & Axis planes?

Answer: Believe me, there is nothing I would like to do more than adding Allied and Axis aircraft to the Drive-In. But....

Availability. The only surviving pilot training film/videos I have found are for American aircraft. I think this is probably due to a combination of the incredible instructional output of WWII Hollywood, fairly good archiving here in the US, and the lack of production (or destruction) of such films abroad. Hollywood cranked out thousands of instructional films during the war, and the US government compiled tens of thousands of detailed manuals for just about every piece of government issue equipment. While there was no concerted effort at the time to preserve these artifacts for future generations, shear volume of production combined with bureaucratic filing excesses have ensured the random survival of a significant number of such materials. On the other hand, good source materials from Axis and Allied sources are sparse indeed -- at least here in the US. The only German pilot training film I have seen excerpted in documentaries is one for the ME-262 -- in German, of course. I have not seen a copy of it available for sale commercially. Someday, I may have the National Archives in Washington make me a copy of the copy of the 262 film they have, but for now, that's too expensive for our meager budget.

Copyright. All the original films that the videos on my site are taken from are, under US law because of age and or origin, "in the public domain" and therefore royalty free. That is the only way I could afford to post them and that "public domain" status is a prerequisite for all the material on my site. That limits the universe of what I can show. That means that, contrary to the suggestions I occasionally get, I can't just video tape a program about the Bf-109 off the Discovery Channel, digitize it into streamingl video, and post it on my site. Even if the Discovery Channel allowed this, their royalty charges would be cost prohibitive.

Films seized from the Axis are probably also in the public domain, but other than those "Marching through Poland" type newsreels, not a lot has turned up. Copyright laws in Britain are different from the US, so even if I could find a Spit film, I might not be able to show it.

Who owns the copyright on your videos?

I can and do copyright my RealVideo and Windows Media encoded video files and the DVD versions of the films so they can't be freely copied or redistributed. Those copyrights are on my particular digitally encoded files and the restored and re-edited videos on our DVDs, not on the original archival films. So, even though the original films are "public domain," the videos on this web site and on our DVDs cannot be copied or redistributed in any way without our permission. We license our footage for a reasonable fee, which is much less expensive than having your own copies of the originals made from the National Archives.

If you wish to link to one of our aircraft pages, please link to the entire page "xxxx.html," not to the individual video files. That is a violation of copyright.

If you know where I can obtain a copy of an aircraft video that meets all the above criteria, please contact Zeno

Question -- I'm having a problem playing your videos.

1. If the video starts and stops frequently or the picture pixelates (breaks up into little squares), there is probably a bottleneck on the internet somewhere between your computer and our video server. That can happen occasionally even if you have a broadband connection. Try using a lower bandwidth option (56k instead of 150k) for a while or come back a little later when the "'Net Storm' has subsided. And, of course, be sure that your connection has sufficient bandwidth to support the video connection you select.  If you are using a 28.8 dial up modem, trying to watch a video through a link labeled "150k broadband "will be an exercise in futility.

2. All the videos don't play at all or the player does not launch when I click on the video link. My experience has been that in almost every case these kinds of problems can be cured simply by uninstalling and then reinstalling your video player.

3. I get an error message like "file not found." If the rest of the videos on our site you are playing normally, but one file is giving you an error mesaage, it's probably a faulty link. Please contact Zeno so we can fix the problem.