first 14 sec of videos are blurred
grosloulou
Registered Users Posts: 87 Big grins
hello,
i have taken lot of short videos (15-20sec) during holidays i wanted to post for the family and i was surprised quality being so bad.
i looked on my pc and they were quite sharp.
in fact the smugmug codec buffer blurs the first 10-14sec of any MOV or H264 video. Not acceptable !
i did the same on flickr and it is very good.
also on youtube but it requires so many infos about privacy, security,...that i don't intend to use youtube videos inside smugmug
please fix the codec as soon as possible or ask help to Flickr team.
marc
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I measured a bunch of mine a few months ago and found almost all were blurred for 12 seconds.
Even reloading didn't help, you would think they would play from the cache, but they did not.
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I've seen the same, although unlike Allen I often get good results on a second viewing. All that's on a very fast fiber connection. I think what's at work is that SmugMug's implementation of adaptive resolution takes way, way longer than anybody else's to figure out the bandwidth availability. The feed spends the initial 12 seconds or so at very low resolution before deciding it can deliver more. I just did a check on Flickr, uploading two videos and playing them. Both did just fine the first time. If that's generally the case, I too would welcome a technology transfer.
For now I've given up on SmugMug for videos. I have a Vimeo subscription and embed their videos on my SmugMug site. That works well, avoids the YouTube issues, but requires paying an annual fee. I'd be delighted if SmugMug could make that unnecessary.
I don't think many visitors will watch a video twice as bad as it looks. They wouldn't think, hey, it's got to get better viewing again.
I try to limit my videos to about 20 second so almost all would look bad.
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Embeds out of Vimeo are i-frame blocks. I thought Smugmug couldn't accept i-frames. So how do you offer up videos on SM?
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky
Inside "Content and Design" there are SmugMug-supplied Vimeo and YouTube content blocks. Look under the Video heading. They are i-frames, but ones SmugMug provides. I generally tuck them in at the end of a gallery page.
Here's a example gallery: https://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Sierra-Nevada/The-Circle-of-Solitude/Cloud-Canyon-and-Avalanche/
There are SmugMug videos in-line with the still photos, then two Vimeo blocks at the very bottom.
Jim, thanks! That looks very useful. Those vids of yours play perfectly from the start - I've had the weird ~12 seconds of blur with my own SM hosted videos.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky
The December / January Release Notes led me to revisit this. First, using Firefox, I played maybe dozen of my SmugMug-hosted videos. I chose ones I haven't looked at in a while and thus were likely not cached anywhere on my system. The results were mixed. One or two reached full resolution in less than three seconds. Maybe another six met the advertised three seconds. But four or so did not. One got there in two steps, reaching full resolution in maybe 5 seconds. A few others started a little under full resolution, jumped to much lower resolution, then improved, in one or two steps, to full resolution something like 10-15 seconds from when the video began playing. The "failures" tended to be longer videos -- several minutes -- while the successful ones tended to be shorter. All did well on a re-play. Having done that, I tried maybe six more on Chrome. Four met the advertised three-second timing. At least one of these was a longer video. But two -- again longer videos -- just spun their little wheel and never played. I waited maybe 30 seconds. For these, hitting the stop button and then the start arrow didn't help. However, when I left the lightbox and returned, both played at full resolution from the beginning! I never saw the very low resolution and 10-15 second step up on Chrome. That was unique to Firefox. Clearly there are some speed detection / adaptive resolution oddities at work here. I don't know if the Firefox/Chrome differences are accidental from my small sample or structurally representative of browser differences. My internet line is fast -- gig fiber. I've never seen any of these sorts of bad behavior on my Vimeo postings of the same videos. On Vimeo, my videos come up at full resolution or arrive there less than a second after play begins. All the videos in question are FHD and my screen resolution is greater (QHD, 2560 x 1440). Win 10.
Suffice to say, while there has been an improvement, there's more to be done. I'd invite others here on DGrin to do some testing and report. Is it just my connectivity and my videos?
(Typo fix Feb 8, nothing substantive.)
hello everybody,
sorry not having given you any feedback but i receive no notification about posted answer. where do we click to follow the topic ?
I follow this topic with heroes until now and they are very polite and transfer my suggestions (latest one was, like perhaps flickr does, load and play insteda of doing both at same time) but nothing happens and nobody visits my video anymore.
My videos are just family memories and all games of our young dog on the beach,..; so short clips 20sec max. awful
Very disapointed.
All websites i tried were ok but vimeo, google,... requires to sign for dafety content,... and takes time to broadcast somewhere. smugmug with their iphone app is amazing tool.
posting 20 short video in vimeo frames is also tedious.
waiting smugmug RD works on that hot topic.
As developer, i would say that fixing this bug should be few days work (worst case) so don't understand why still not done.
best regards
marc
The video experience on Smugmug is horrible. It's 2021 and still, the first 15-20 secs are at the lowest resolution. Every other platform out there does a better job with videos. Have a look how google photos or youtube is handling a video stream.
Since it's not clear how often SmugMug staff review postings on Dgrin, I suggest you write the help desk (help@smugmug.com) directly.
Time to revive this ancient thread. This may be fixed! I've just been checking some of my old videos, and all played well from the beginning. I tried may 15 of them. That's good ... and fairly new. Just a few months ago I did a similar check and found the fraction that played well from the beginning seemed to be higher than before but not yet up to 100%. The question, of course, is whether I was just lucky today or whether the magic fix for this old bug is finally, finally in place. Could others who have seen poor video playback check some of their old videos?
Addendum: I'm on a PC, using Windows 10. My tests were on Firefox and Chrome.
Looked a a bunch here and didn't notice any delay.
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