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About this website:

  1. This site is intended for practising referees as an additional training tool. It is intended complement, not replace, any instruction/recertification activities conducted by your national/state association.
  2. The clips and associated interpretations are mine, and mine alone - they are not intended to represent any official US Soccer Federation position. Hopefully, however, they are compatible with USSF instruction.
  3. Please see the Conditions of Use for more information about the goals and limitations of use of materials available through this website.
  4. Because the contents are intended for practising referees, no attempt has been made to accommodate persons with visual disabilities. (This is not intended to stimulate humorous digressions about any specific referee's visual acuity, other than mine.)
  5. I hope to be enhancing this site on a regular basis, but this is not my “day-job”, so my progress in any enhancement will likely be irregular, at best. If you wish to be informed of major changes, please send your email address to me at peter.guthrie.ref@gmail.com to add to my mailing list.
  6. Likewise, I can‘t promise any additional enhancements will ever be made to this site - it depends on my time and enthusiasm. If you have any ideas for cool additions, please let me know.
  7. IMPORTANT: This site is now using the JWPlayer, which reduces browser dependencies. Also, many functions have been converted to JQuery, which also reduces browser oddities.
  8. I routinely test my “improvements” on Internet Explorer 9/11, Firefox 28+, Chrome 33+, and Safari 5.0+. However, I have found that browser setup on an individual computer will impact that computer‘s compatibility
  9. This site should be easy to use. If you are having problems, please check the Help tab.
  10. If you are still having problems after checking Help, please contact me; include information on your computer setup: operating system, browser, and browser version. If the problem is due to your Internet connection speed, there‘s nothing I can do about that.
  11. All video clips have been extracted from broadcast matches, the vast majority of which are professional/international matches; these are, unfortunately, somewhat different than the matches most of us referee. However, there are lessons to be learned in almost any match that can be applied to almost any other match, if you look carefully enough. This website presents a small selection of the clips I have extracted from a growing collection of recorded matches - that collection now exceeds 3,500 4,500 matches, most of which are complete matches.
  12. If you are curious about the tools I have found useful for extracting and processing these clips from those recordings:
  13. Primary computer system:
  14. Intel Core i7-2600 @ 3.40 GHz; 16 GB ram; 240GB SSD as my system drive, and 5 additional hard drives (two of which are in hot-swappable docks) for a total of 7TB of hard disk space; NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 graphics adaptor (primarily for use as a GPU for video encoding software); 2 HD monitors (one is a 26 inch HD monitor with 0.317mm pixels - easier for us old-folks to see)
  15. Software (all with different strengths and weaknesses):
  16. Video Capture: WM Recorder; WM VideoClone; WM Capture; I also use a Hauppauge digitizing box for recording straight from cable
  17. Video Editing: Magix Video Pro X7; CyberLink PowerDirector 13; Adobe Premier Elements; ULead MediaStudio 8
  18. Additional Image Editing: NIH Image-J; GIMP 2; InkScape; Adobe Photoshop Elements
  19. Video Conversion and encoding: FFmpeg; HandBrake; Any Video Convertor Professional; Movavi Video Suite 14, plus a large number of other programs I will use for a specific task should those options fail
  20. Website Development: Notepad++; xampp installation of Apache/MySQL/phpMyAdmin; KompoZer; phpDesigner;
  21. Browsers for testing: IE9; IE10; IE11; Chrome 43+; Safari 5+; Firefox 39
  22. Operating systems for testing: Windows XP; Windows 7/64 bit; Windows 8; Linux Mint 14; (sorry - my Mac died :-(
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