Am I the only person who loves movies?
playernovis
Registered Users Posts: 19 Big grins
I signed up for Smugmug 3 years ago. Back then it was really the best photo and really good home movie online storage service out there ... 3 years later tons of really cool new features we added, but movies are the same, the same old school MPEG2 8MB (16MB for PRO account).... i think it's time to really rethink this.
1. 8MB limit per movie (16MB for PRO account) is ehm size of 3 snaps from my camera, I can pay per movie storage, I have really tons of movies from my camera, I cannot cut 60% because they don't fit to 8MB
2. MPEG2 format ... yeah sure it is almost 100% compatible with all browsers and OS out there, but my site is not social site and I share it with my family and friends only, they all have MAC or PC with IE or FireFox. There are really new formats out there, I spend really a lot of time try to convert my camera's format to this 1965 format.
3. ActiveX embedded Windows Media Player in IE is really not a good way to show movies in 2007... FLASH.... I hear you screaming now about it. No seriously, flash is really the only serious option for movies online. Again, I will be more than happy to pay for having it ....
Maybe you can have special account for movie lovers. Not all users need this, but there are tons of us, who would really really use it.
love your service, could love it even more !!
:barb
jiri
jiri.smugmug.com
1. 8MB limit per movie (16MB for PRO account) is ehm size of 3 snaps from my camera, I can pay per movie storage, I have really tons of movies from my camera, I cannot cut 60% because they don't fit to 8MB
2. MPEG2 format ... yeah sure it is almost 100% compatible with all browsers and OS out there, but my site is not social site and I share it with my family and friends only, they all have MAC or PC with IE or FireFox. There are really new formats out there, I spend really a lot of time try to convert my camera's format to this 1965 format.
3. ActiveX embedded Windows Media Player in IE is really not a good way to show movies in 2007... FLASH.... I hear you screaming now about it. No seriously, flash is really the only serious option for movies online. Again, I will be more than happy to pay for having it ....
Maybe you can have special account for movie lovers. Not all users need this, but there are tons of us, who would really really use it.
love your service, could love it even more !!
:barb
jiri
jiri.smugmug.com
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I do not work for Smugmug, but I observe that in those 3 years you mention, other sites have focused on movies and built a lot of functionality for them that I would not recommend Smugmug ever try to match (primarily because it's not their expertise and it would take away from their efforts to enhance our photo experience). In fact, I'd recommend they do some sort of partnership with a movie site so they could make it easier for Smugmug users to upload and keep their movies somewhere else, but display them on their Smugmug pages.
Is there any reason you don't put your movies on YouTube and just link or embed them in your Smugmug page from there?
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Maybe we don't understand each other. I'm not asking to change SmugMug and the way they handle things (I really like the current style), changing limits from 8MB to let's say 25MB and changing windows media player embedded in IE (this is really ugly) to FLASH will NOT change the spirit of SmugMug. It will actually improve the quality and "sleekness" (is this actual word) and make users experience even better, plus it would allow owners of the videos to process everything faster without spending lot of time converting and decreasing the quality just to fit 8MB.
thanks
jiri
According to their help page here http://www.smugmug.com/help/video3 they say the reason is "Much as we'd love to support other formats, MPEG-1 is the only format that is broadly supported by almost every computer."
That may have been true a couple years ago before the explosion of YouTube, Google Video, and all the others. I would be willing to bet that 99% of the people who have visited a Smugmug gallery have previously viewed an online video in Flash format and would not run into any viewer problems.
I'm sure the Smugmug folks are aware of this too and are probably considering changes (at least I hope that's the case).
On the other hand, Smugmug is really focused on photos and not videos. To expand into more robust video options sort of makes them a YouTube competitor and I'm not sure that's what they should be focusing their time on. I would be happy if there were cleaner ways of embedding videos from YouTube into my existing galleries. Making a video-only gallery with the embedded HTML in the gallery description or using a placeholder thumbnail in a photo gallery with the embedding HTML in the photo caption are both a bit cumbersome. It would be nice to be able to treat an embedded video just like a photo (captions, keywords, etc.) without having to jump through some hoops.
Having 25MB per movie with ability to upload different formats and being able to see it as flash without waiting 8 seconds for silly Windows Media Player to load inside IE is not moving SmugMug to YouTube category.
I'm not pro photographer, I just go for vacation, take 200 photos and 5 short movies and want to share it with my family. I simply cannot share movie longer than one minute now ... Am I asking for too much?
It is definitely more manual work to set it up than it should be and we should goad/hound Smugmug to do something about that because their movie capabilities today are dark ages technology. But, with a little bit of work on your part, you could deliver a good user experience today, but you'd have to use something like YouTube to host the movies themselves and insert them into your Smugmug galleries with some custom HTML.
See this thread and this thread and this thread for a discussion of embedding movies. Here's a gallery of flash videos from the first of those three threads to see what it can look like.
If you are not interested in leveraging other technologies/services to offer a better viewer experience today, then you'll just have to keep banging on Smugmug to fix their movie capabilities and wait for them to respond. I don't think anyone disagrees that the current movie support from Smugmug is dismal - folks are just suggesting alternatives.
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Please read your own response before you start arguing, you did not mention YouTube ONLY AS A WAY TO GET USER EXPERIENCE, you clearly state it as competitor and why SmugMug should not focus on video.
I'm sorry but I never asked for help to stick YouTube to my site, I had a suggesting for an improvement, nothing more nothing less.
I think that everyone that posts movies on SmugMug (I'm one) would agree with you. Improved SmugMug support of movies would be awesome.
I also think that those suggesting you embed YouTube videos in your SmugMug site are trying to help you find a work-around given the current limitations. That could be considered to be a nice thing of them to offer help like that.
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Yes, it's very nice they try to help, but that's not what I was asking for ... maybe if more people would ask for better video support, SmugMug would consider it... without asking, it's hard tu guess what users want.
I'm sorry I was wasting everybody's time.
If anyone from smugmug is reading how about this:
Create a "Power+Video" and "Pro+Video" subscription level that has support for flash video with up to 100MB per video. Charge a bit more than the standard accounts to cover the potentially larger than average disk usage from these users. In order to limit the resources needed to support this, place the following limitations:
- Require users to generate their own flash video (FLV) files. I don't expect Smugmug to convert my RAW files to JPG, so why should I expect you to convert my video into a presentable format, FLV in this case.
- Setup a support forum here on dgrin so users can help each other optimize the conversion to FLV files, just like there are forums that talk about RAW processing.
This would address one big concern raised by Baldy in an older thread about need tons of resources to convert video. In this model, Smugmug would simply be a file host.Why not use YouTube or Google Video? Quality. The quality of the videos from these sites is poor. I would definitely pay a premium to have VGA or better quality video.
-Scott
scwalter.smugmug.com
FYI, when you request a feature in an open forum, you shouldn't be surprised if people disagree with your feature request because they don't want Smugmug spending their time on that, suggest better ways to solve the problem or suggest work-arounds. That's how it works here. I'm sorry you took offense at the other suggestions - I don't think any sort of personal attack was intended - just people trying to be helpful or add their own opinions to the conversation.
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I was loosing my faith that there is somebody who understands my point. Thank you for your comment!!
jiri
But after going through the pain of transcoding (and having to write an freaking AppleScript so that my wife could use FFMPEGX could automatically do it for the AVI files from our little Canon point-and-shoot), and also dealing with filesize limits, I decided it just wasn't worth it, so I don't think we've uploaded in a while.
Meanwhile, last September, a friend turned me on to Phanfare. They definitely have the idea that video is an important element of their photo hosting business. Now they've only been around since 2004, and I do think their web UI is too bloated with Flash and they sadly don't offer all the flexibility that Smugmug does with viewing styles, customization, etc.
But they get the video equation. They allow uploading in any format, and they do the transcoding for you to the Flash format, in a range of bitrates to allow for slower CPUs and connections.
Right now I'm still paying for Smugmug, and I'm reserving judgement on Phanfare's longevity and reliability, but for video stuff it's where I'm doing all my posting. If you want to check it out, my site is http://darryl.phanfare.com/
Also, their uploading is via slick Windows or OS X clients that allow for background uploading while you're doing captioning/arranging, etc. It's actually quite nice.
I started with a free trial, so it's at least worth looking at. PM me if you want a $7 off referral code.
--Darryl
It is still 100% private type site (no social site with 2000 comments like flickr), they combine very nicely photo+video+audio together - this is ideal for my party and family snaps. I will try it for Bay to Breakers photos this upcoming Sunday !!
:ivar
I wish Smugmug would pick 10% of video features from this site... full screen EXE slideshow is amazing (slideshow is another thing I complain before - Smugmug support told me to upgrade from IE6 to IE7 because of IE6 bug ... hmmm).
For what it's worth, I seem to remember one of the smugmug gurus saying that he knows how he would like to implement the video hosting. The only problem is that he is far too busy trying to scale up Smugmug to cope with the increase in users, and the video plan keeps slipping.
Wow, you are one angry person Playernovis. I don't think you quite get the spirit of this forum. If this is how you communicate to the helpful people in this forum then please keep your opinions to yourself and stop posting.
darryl, scwalter and PBolchover had actually very nice and helpful comments, and reacted to my original post.
SmugMug is full profit company, I posted comment to Support forum about feature which should (in my and as I could see I was not alone) change. Nothing more, nothing less.
if you have nothing to add to the actual question, please send me private message instead of public comments like this.
thank you
There's a lot to love about Smugmug, but this issue has been seemingly ignored by the Smugmug staff for quite a long time...
The Photos: photos.jasondunn.com
The Blog: www.jasondunn.com
But I don't. I'd like to upload videos and have them presented in the format they were uploaded as. If Flash were to become the only option (directly, or through YouTube) I would not use it at all, period.
Look through my eyes on Cultural Surfaces! - customizing... currently in a state between limbo and chaos
What format are you trying to use? What player do you expect your viewers to use?
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The MPEG-1 format was created in the early 1990's as a means of compressing video to fit on CD-Rs. Forcing us to upload video in the 15 year old MPEG-1 format is the equivalent of asking us to submit photos by saving as TIF, burning them to CD, and mailing them to smugmug. (i.e. That's where digital photography was 15 years ago.)
Many of us upgraded to Power accounts specifically to share video. Given the time and effort involved in converting movie files to 8MB MPEG-1 (and the poor playback MPEG-1 has in most browsers) it hardly seems worth it.
Smugmug should either stop charging extra for video capability, or should update to 21st century video standards. I would prefer the latter. We should be able to upload standard video formats, within a size limit (say, 20 Mb or so), and smugmug should convert them to a standard format (Flash or QT) for playback on the site. This is what everyone is asking for, and it really does not need to be any more complicated.
- If 1% of the population can't view the converted video files, just send them a link to download the proper plug-in.
- If there are concerns about conversion quality, or maintaining our original video files/formats, make it clear in the user agreement that these are part of the deal.
- Questions of processing, storage, and bandwidth are all answered with hardware additions/upgrades.
Am I missing anything? The arguments for staying with MPEG-1 just don't hold water.THREE CHEERS! Sounds fair to me. How hard is this to implement? I am willing to pay more per year for a decent flash video service. i just want to share 1-3 minute clips.
While I agree with most of what others have said about Smugmug's video capability being underwhelming, I have to say that for the occasional posting, it was a lot easier than I'd anticipated.
My Digitial still camera has a movie mode for short clips. I took a couple the other day of my grandson's first steps. After reading some of the Dgrin postings about SmugMug's video capability, I did not relish the thought of reading tutorials about Codecs and other video stuff I don't begin to understand, let alone forking over $50 bucks for the recommended conversion program to turn .MOV files into MPEG-1's.
Maybe I just got lucky, though. When I clicked on the file in my picture editing software (Corel), I found I could right clidk to export (convert) directly to an AVI file format...easy enough. THEN, a 2 second download of the free version of the FX-MPeg writer mentioned in SmugMug's help pages set the stage for conversion #2...this time to MGEG-1 file format.
Finally, I created a new Smugmug gallery, and used the standard uploader to browse to, and grab, the MPEG-1 file for uploading.
I just accepted the defaults. The whole thing took less time to do than to write this posting.
Is the resulting MPEG video a bit grainy?....yes. Would I want to repeat this process often for "high volume" video posting?....no.
Should a Smugmug Power account user avoid it altogether and not consider posting a once-in-a-lifetime event (like a grandhcild's first steps) to share with family and friends?....that would be DUMB!
It was really a relative "piece of cake". So my advice is to use it if you can...SmugMug will catch up eventually with better capability, I'm sure. In the meantime, you'll still be able to have something worthwile, and all in one place, and without additional expense or 3rd party accounts to manage.
But what drives me nuts is that I capture the videos from my camera with windows movie maker straight to a low-quality wmv format. Typically, with audio, my files are 3 to 4 megabytes. After converting to mpeg-1, they lose quality, the audio is removed (not needed), and the file size grows to 12-15 megs.
Allowing users to upload wmv files would save smugmug a ton of money. I'd even be just fine with it if they were unable to create thumbnails of video files (if that's part of the video format problem). Maybe give the option to upload a separate image to be used as a thumbnail.
Flash might be even better, as it's probably the most universal video type being used now. I bet a watermark could even be added to a flash file automatically when the video is converted, just like with photos. But converting video files to flash probably requires a lot of processing... I think the number of acceptable video formats could just be increased. At a minimum, wmv and mov files are pretty universal.
But as annoying as converting to mpeg-1 is, it's still a whole lot easier than uploading to youtube or something and embedding the videos into captions. I don't have THAT much time on my hands.
Dave
http://pilotdave.smugmug.com/keyword/video
Everytime I have come to this forum the last few months, I've seen people complaining about their site moving SLOW. I have noticed the same thing on numerous occasions on my own site.
Do you think a dramatic increase of users downloading VIDEOS would really help the situation? Even if we'd have to pay more so they could buy better equipment or whatever to host the videos...wouldn't you rather they use that equpiment to help serve the Photos instead of the Videos?
I know I would.
If you want better videos, use YouTube. If you want better videos than YouTube and you're willing to pay for it, you can host your videos with Dreamhost now at $23 for your first year.
If they keep the same size limits but add allowable file types, they could improve the situation a great deal... at least for how long it takes to download videos.
Same video, different format, could mean a huge reduction in file size AND improvement in quality.
I believe the photos and videos are hosted by Amazon.com's simple storage service anyway, so the file sizes of videos (if larger ones were allowed) probably wouldn't slow the site down at all... they'd just take longer to download.
Dave