?

Let's try this again. Last time, all I got was a couple too-clever-by-half non-answers, so I'm going to try to better explain the type of expertise I'm looking for:

- By all accounts, historians have plenty of evidence that Blackbeard was a skilled, experienced sailor and a worthy, intelligent captain. They are also quick to note that at least some other pirates bested his feats, by a wide margin.

- Various articles list him among "great" pirates but demur at whether they are doing so for his successes or simply his legend.

- My problem is that I have no barometer to measure the success or failure of standard pirates in the era. Were Blackbeard's feats (uniting a handful of ships into a fleet, a succesful blockade of Charles Town, and 2-ish years of more standard crimes) inordinately successful? Above average? Just enough for this memorably odd and scary human being to make his mark on the popular imagination?

- If you're one of those flimsy moralizers, come to preach about how this is seeking "praise" for a criminal, move along. I'm looking for objective information about how successful this historical figure was, compared to others of his ilk.

Already read all the articles you're gonna find, so no "Google said yes" answers, please. Said articles say he was skilled, experienced, and worthy but quickly stress that other pirates out-did him, by pretty much any barometer. 

So was he truly exceptional? Or just a more-menacing-than-average rogue, who happened to get a hold of the popular conscious?

This is complicated...

I filmed something on a borrowed 2006 Sony Handycam, and I wanted to download it onto my computer, but this is apparently complicated if you can't download the picture package software on the CD it came with, which their website offers without the CD, but apparently you still need a code I don't have.

When I attempted to download all of the scenes on the disc on which I saved what I filmed, six video files showed up on my DVD RW drive, which I successfully moved to my video folder. 5 refuse to play, claiming to not be compatible with Windows Media Player or Movie Maker. The sixth one plays just fine, but it's only the first 19 seconds of what I filmed. BUT, when I start at least a few seconds in and hit the fast forward button on Movie Maker, it jumps ahead to something from later in the disc, which plays out for the rest of the 19 seconds, sometimes with the audio and picture in sync, sometimes not. So it's apparently all there but not in a format I can work with.

Can any of this be remedied so I can play back and edit everything I filmed, or is my only shot really to hope that the original owner hasn't thrown out the Picture Package disc and try again after downloading what's on there? I'd be grateful for any level of expertise.

Whenever I save a Windows Movie Maker project, I save one copy to my computer's folder for videos and one on the Movie Maker program itself. When I open them back up, the one in my folder is always fine, but the one on the program adds in clips I cut, adds repeat copies of what's already there, adds extra copies of the narration (one embedded into the video and one added in any random place that I still have the option to remove), and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. I always have to open a new project with the copy saved in my folder, which, granted, works okay, but I'm guessing there are no guarantees, and I'd really like to know what I'm missing.

Thanks