Deleted previous rambling..hours of stumbling around in my own noobish way, I have solved more or less my problem (one silly mistake was that I had 'videos' in my paramaters path, and 'video' as the folder in images/stories- no wonder the player couldn't find it and just kept trying to load ;D  I converted the 'mpg' to an 'flv' and added 'flv', to the array  in admin.media.php. Still big problem now:  when you first press the play button, the clip starts for half a second, then stops, and video goes black, then it plays again  not really playing, more like a frame, then another, really slow and jerky. I even ran the file through a video program to set the quality higher, but don't really know what settings- what does one suggest? please help, it really looks awful on such a fantastic player..