Feature request: better video support

marlinspike · February 10, 2005

Lately I've been uploading some videos, and I've found that unless I do serious violence to the image quality, it's impossible to get an MPEG-1 under 8mb (now a wmv is a different story). Also, the window that a video is shown in needs to be bigger since as it is the volume adjustment on the plug-in player is hidden from view. I also think the standard size for the video should be larger.
Richard

Enoch · February 27, 2005

marlinspike wrote:

Lately I've been uploading some videos, and I've found that unless I do serious violence to the image quality, it's impossible to get an MPEG-1 under 8mb (now a wmv is a different story). Also, the window that a video is shown in needs to be bigger since as it is the volume adjustment on the plug-in player is hidden from view. I also think the standard size for the video should be larger.
Richard

"Much as we'd love to support other formats, MPEG-1 is the only format that is broadly supported by almost every computer" is lame! :poke

Please give a reasonable explanation. I absolutely love smugmug, but this is a very weak spot. Video is almost worthless with the use of only MPEG-1 as is it's almost imposible to get video compressed in that format! Keep in mind, I'm not asking for you to raise the 8 MB limit. Just an option to get my video to the limit and still look decent.

Thank you.

Andy · February 27, 2005

Enoch wrote:

"Much as we'd love to support other formats, MPEG-1 is the only format that is broadly supported by almost every computer" is lame! :poke

Please give a reasonable explanation. I absolutely love smugmug, but this is a very weak spot. Video is almost worthless with the use of only MPEG-1 as is it's almost imposible to get video compressed in that format! Keep in mind, I'm not asking for you to raise the 8 MB limit. Just an option to get my video to the limit and still look decent.

Thank you.

here's the problem. you (the collective you, not directed only at you

) load up a fancy video using (wmv, quicktime, xb7-xc or whatever the fancy format du jour is...). you and your close circle of techno-friends have the proper player installed on your computer - so, no problem when playing it. but, grandma, she's on win 98 - and clicks, and gets nothing. then smugmug help desk gets flooded with calls, "i can't see the movie my grandson put up on his website!"

you can picture the rest.

smugmug is for photosharing. the movies are a nice addition for power and pro users, but there's *got* to be a lowest common denominator, so that viewer experience is good, help desk calls minimized.

hope this helps.

Enoch · February 27, 2005

andy wrote:

here's the problem. you (the collective you, not directed only at you ) load up a fancy video using (wmv, quicktime, xb7-xc or whatever the fancy format du jour is...). you and your close circle of techno-friends have the proper player installed on your computer - so, no problem when playing it. but, grandma, she's on win 98 - and clicks, and gets nothing. then smugmug help desk gets flooded with calls, "i can't see the movie my grandson put up on his website!"

you can picture the rest.

smugmug is for photosharing. the movies are a nice addition for power and pro users, but there's *got* to be a lowest common denominator, so that viewer experience is good, help desk calls minimized.

hope this helps.

Fair enough...i guess.

The irony is that it has never worked right as it is. I always have to allow the entire video to down load, then hit the refresh button for it to work. On my brothers PC, the only way to get it to work was to save it to the computer first, then use Windows Media Player. So do you currently get "grandma's" calling about it?

I do realize that this is a photo sharing sight, and I should be grateful for what I got....but it sure would be nice.

Enoch · February 27, 2005

Oh yes...most of all...thanks for responding!

georges · February 27, 2005

I usually use Photo Explorer, a program from Ulead to trim and convert my videos for display at Smugmug. I'm curious what other people use.

My videos are all very short clips. More like video snapshots for friends and family.

You can see them at http://georges.smugmug.com scroll down to the keywords and click on "video". Just family stuff, nothing exciting.

Thanks, gs

Andy · February 27, 2005

georges wrote:

I usually use Photo Explorer, a program from Ulead to trim and convert my videos for display at Smugmug. I'm curious what other people use.

My videos are all very short clips. More like video snapshots for friends and family.

You can see them at http://georges.smugmug.com scroll down to the keywords and click on "video". Just family stuff, nothing exciting.

Thanks, gs

there's a free pkg called tmpgenc you can google it. i used that for a long time... quite good and the price is right

Tommyboy · February 27, 2005

Video Trauma

andy wrote:

there's a free pkg called tmpgenc you can google it. i used that for a long time... quite good and the price is right

GRRRRRRRRR! I'm REALLY frustrated after multiple attempts to upload video. Can anyone help me? This is a Mac issue, I'm running OS X (pre Jag). I've downloaded multiple programs and NOTHING works. The advice on smugmug's help section is worthless.

ANY suggestions?

Thanks,

TM

Enoch · February 28, 2005

georges wrote:

I usually use Photo Explorer, a program from Ulead to trim and convert my videos for display at Smugmug. I'm curious what other people use.

My videos are all very short clips. More like video snapshots for friends and family.

You can see them at http://georges.smugmug.com scroll down to the keywords and click on "video". Just family stuff, nothing exciting.

Thanks, gs

Interesting, no issues watching your video's. Plays like it should.

Maybe I need to down load mine again.

By the way, I use Premiere Pro for my video editing.

Baldy · February 28, 2005

We apologize for the messiness of video. It's a tough nut to crack for sharing sites because the formats are so fractured. The thing about MPEG1 is it will play on the highest number of machines and we can validate it, which is a very important point. We can't be receiving formats that we can't validate for reasons of security.

We think the future is MPEG4, a nice format but not widely used yet.

Enoch · March 1, 2005

Baldy wrote:

We apologize for the messiness of video. It's a tough nut to crack for sharing sites because the formats are so fractured. The thing about MPEG1 is it will play on the highest number of machines and we can validate it, which is a very important point. We can't be receiving formats that we can't validate for reasons of security.

We think the future is MPEG4, a nice format but not widely used yet.

Thanks for that explanation! Is this the same reason why we probably wont be having 360 panorama software, security? This is by far the best excuse I've heard, thank you.

I will be hopping for the use of MPEG-4! That would be wonderful if it works out!

marlinspike · March 1, 2005

Baldy wrote:

We apologize for the messiness of video. It's a tough nut to crack for sharing sites because the formats are so fractured. The thing about MPEG1 is it will play on the highest number of machines and we can validate it, which is a very important point. We can't be receiving formats that we can't validate for reasons of security.

We think the future is MPEG4, a nice format but not widely used yet.

Doesn't everybody in the world have windows media player by now (or quicktime for mac users I suppose)? I mean, a lot of regular websites use wmv format.

{JT} · March 2, 2005

*cough* Mac user here, and I while I do have windows media player (for Mac) it does not read all of the WMV formats that it's Windows counterpart does. If anything, Quicktime is a better cross platform choice ...

(perfect example of why we still stick to mpeg1, right there)

marlinspike wrote:

Doesn't everybody in the world have windows media player by now (or quicktime for mac users I suppose)? I mean, a lot of regular websites use wmv format.

Feature request: better video support

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