I can’t think of any reason why they aren’t just posted as jpegs on his website.
JPEG is a lossy compression scheme. If you got a JPEG, you could soon be griping it was not "the real thing"...
No good deed goes unpunished...
Go onto Rick's Flickr account and ask him? I contacted Rick within days of seeing his images posted on Flickr and got the answer. It is a private mail so I will not divulge it on here.
Why are you so reluctant to contact Rick and ask his opinion on what he saw and filmed? The zip file works perfectly. Check the download portion of your computer?