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View Full Version : Calling All Readers: Help Me Torture Test a Video Solution


Jason Dunn
11-19-2008, 12:00 PM
<p>About two months ago, I purchased a <a href="http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&amp;fcategoryid=177&amp;modelid=16187" target="_blank">Canon HF100</a> high-definition video camera to replace my ageing but still totally sweet Canon GL2 (that thing has such great optics!). It took me a while to re-create my template in 16:9 format, but I did and published my first two HD videos to YouTube...and I was quite <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/91318/dell-inspiron-mini-9-netbook-unboxing-and-first-impressions.html" target="_blank">disappointed with the results</a>. YouTube only offers a 4:3 aspect ratio player, so 16:9 videos look pretty tiny with those big black bars on the top and bottom. I set out to find a better solution for embedding videos on Thoughts Media sites, and I think I've found one: <a href="http://www.motionbox.com/" target="_blank">MotionBox</a>.</p><p>I say "I think" because while the video quality is utterly fantastic, and for $20 per year they offer a lot of value, I've been seeing some problematic playback issues today - sometimes the video will start right away, other times it will take 30+ seconds before it starts, and sometimes it won't start at all, instead showing a black box. And sometimes it will just "break" and stop playing. These are obviously serious problems, but I don't know if MotionBox is just having a bad day, or if my bandwidth Kung-fu is weak today. So check out the video below and report back what you find - does it play back OK? Any problems or glitches?</p><p><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="600" height="338" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="src" value="http://www.motionbox.com/external/hd_player/type=hd,video_uid=ee9ed7b5171ee364" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="600" height="338" src="http://www.motionbox.com/external/hd_player/type=hd,video_uid=ee9ed7b5171ee364"></embed></object></p>

gibson042
11-19-2008, 01:05 PM
It fails for me. I click play and get only the black box.

gjohnson
11-19-2008, 01:56 PM
Played fine for me.

marjon
11-19-2008, 01:56 PM
Worked fine for me.
Started almost instantly and did not skip or stop during playback.

gdoerr56
11-19-2008, 01:58 PM
Worked perfectly. Started without delay, seeking worked great and didn't see any dropped frames or stutters.

sparkyewu
11-19-2008, 02:01 PM
Was fine for me as well, but I have the latest flash. I know for their HD versions (Not sure what you settled on for format) the later versions of flash work much better. The SD version ( still widescreen) plays for me pretty much every time.

peterawest
11-19-2008, 02:23 PM
Worked great for me. Started within one or two seconds. Nice.

Update: I tried it three more times, and each time it failed, even after opening a new window with PPCThoughts.

blazingwolf
11-19-2008, 02:31 PM
No issue with the video for me.

Stinger
11-19-2008, 02:34 PM
Works for me. Started instantly and the full video took around 3 1/2 minutes to download.

jaxim
11-19-2008, 02:42 PM
works well for me. I tried it a few times too. I'm connected through my cable modem.

I also got a HF100 video camera a few months ago. The site I found to upload my videos is Vimeo. If MotionBox doesn't work for you, check out Vimeo to see if that works for you.

smileyguy
11-19-2008, 02:52 PM
I clicked the play button, the screen stayed black.
I waited 30s because you said sometimes the website took that long to respond, the screen stayed black.
I opened a new tab and started reading Apple Thoughts (I'm trying to expand my horizons), checked back, and the screen stayed black.
I went back to Apple thoughts, read a few articles, and then heard an audio blip (like a video starting), checked the video tab, and the screen stayed black.
12 minutes and only one audio blip does not sound like a good service.
Sorry.

As I was writing this I got a second audio blip, so make that two audio blips in 13 minutes.

jeffd
11-19-2008, 03:59 PM
Worked fine for me, needed to do nothing fancy with NoScript to get it to play. it didn't allow for fullscreening though, said it was disabled.

My personal experience with web video led me to Vimeo. I wanted someplace to put up a high resolution version of my WoW guild's Kiljaeden kill. I only came up with one place, vimeo. Their free account is pretty restrictive (1 HD upload a week, and I think 1000 life time views of HD on your videos before your HD is disabled) but for 60 bucks a year most of it goes away.

Neil Enns
11-19-2008, 04:21 PM
What about using http://www.vimeo.com/? That's what the folks over at BoingBoing appear to use.

Neil

Vincent Ferrari
11-19-2008, 04:24 PM
So far, the only word I can use to describe it is sporadic. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It looks great when it does, though.

Vincent Ferrari
11-19-2008, 04:27 PM
What about using http://www.vimeo.com/? That's what the folks over at BoingBoing appear to use.

Neil

The problem with Vimeo is that they aren't really geared toward what Jason wants to do. They tend to be "delete happy" when it comes to videos that don't fit a certain mould. A few months back, my buddy Ryan at Engadget had a problem where they just canned a video without notice for no reason; from that point on, all the Weblogs Inc blogs started using Viddler. It's nowhere near the same quality, but Viddler really is a much more open and friendly site than Vimeo and they do offer a 16:9 player for SD and HD vids.

For HD, Blip seems to do a good job. I'm biased because I use them the most, but lots of sites do some good stuff with them.

It's a shame Motionbox isn't stable enough; their quality really is exceptionally good.

drowe
11-19-2008, 04:29 PM
Worked fine for me. No skips, hesitations, or jumps.

Joe Johaneman
11-19-2008, 04:34 PM
Worked perfectly. Started instantly and I had no jumping or skipping. Smooth all the way.

martin_ayton
11-19-2008, 04:37 PM
It came up very quickly for me but hit constant rebuffering pauses whilst playing. It was a tough test though since I was streaming NASA TV using WMP at the same time (that didn't skip a beat though). I have a relatively slow connection: its an SDSL which usually clocks around 624kbps, but it is uncontended, so it really runs at that speed.

Have you tried ustream? It's really set up for live feeds but it may well also do what you want. Since one of the input options is DVCam, the quality should be good enough.

Jason Dunn
11-19-2008, 04:40 PM
Was fine for me as well, but I have the latest flash. I know for their HD versions (Not sure what you settled on for format) the later versions of flash work much better. The SD version ( still widescreen) plays for me pretty much every time.

I embedded the HD version. I did a broader series of tests here:

http://www.jasondunn.com/motionbox-video-tests-1160#more-1160

mrozema
11-19-2008, 04:55 PM
I tried three times.
First and third played instantly.
The second time didn't even start.

John Lane
11-19-2008, 04:58 PM
I have a Verizon FIOS connection.

The one here worked fine, but the 1920x1080 on your site did not work at all.

Jason Dunn
11-19-2008, 04:58 PM
Thanks for all the great feedback everyone - it seems pretty clear that I won't be sticking with these guys, unless they have a REALLY good explanation for what's going on. I'll be pointing them to this thread though since it's a good example of how hit or miss their playback stability is.

Reid Kistler
11-19-2008, 06:16 PM
Worked fine. Ran all the way through without error from home page (PPC.com), and started OK from within forum message (did not watch it all the 2nd time....)

Firefox 3.x
Windows XP MCE
U-verse DSL

OH: Quality of recording was VG - Excellent (a few understandable focus problems), & found the Video that ran on the Dell to be of surprisingly good visual quality...

Don Tolson
11-19-2008, 06:24 PM
Worked fine for me. Started up right away and ran all the way through with no stops.

jeffd
11-19-2008, 06:54 PM
no complaints on why you cant full screen it?

Richard OKane
11-19-2008, 07:07 PM
No problems here on my work network

Kacey Green
11-19-2008, 07:32 PM
did great w/ the tiny pipe we have here at work

Jason Dunn
11-19-2008, 07:46 PM
OH: Quality of recording was VG - Excellent (a few understandable focus problems)...

Uh, yeah, that would be operator error on my part - but this was about testing the video streaming, not my camera-work. Haha. :D

Jason Dunn
11-19-2008, 07:47 PM
no complaints on why you cant full screen it?

That's a different problem that they're looking into on their end...but yes, I'm definitely aware of it.

Cold Flame
11-19-2008, 08:12 PM
Worked fine for me first try. I haven't tried subsequently, but there was no lag time at all from clicking play all the way through to the end of the clip. Granted, I'm doing this at work and we're on a 10mbps full-duplex fibre connection. If I get a chance, maybe I'll try it at home and post my results too.

dunneldeen
11-19-2008, 09:28 PM
Took about 30 seconds to display, but played really well once it was started.

Video quality is very good, way better than your average YouTube video.

JKingGrim
11-20-2008, 12:14 AM
Played instantly with great quality.

jgrnt1
11-20-2008, 01:21 AM
It started and stopped several times for me. At the beginning, the download progress was ahead of the play point, but downloading slowed so that the play point caught up. The video stopped and it said "buffering" for 20-30 seconds each time. I gave up about a third of the way through the video.

I'm at a hotel, using WiFi in my room, so I made sure it wasn't the hotel which was the problem. While your video was trying to play, I opened a second tab in IE and went to YouTube. I was able to download and play a YouTube video just fine while yours continued to struggle.

I think the hardest part to get used to with your video was the Canadian accent. ;)

austingang
11-20-2008, 03:11 AM
Worked first time and looks great. Paused and started again and it worked fine.

timmy
11-20-2008, 10:32 AM
Worked fine for me. Buffered for some 20-30 secs. But the delay could just be that it buffers quite a lot of the video, since I could skip parts without getting another "buffering" message.

Faenad
11-20-2008, 03:42 PM
I tried two times.
yesterday in the evening the video started immediately, and the download progress was well ahead of the play point here too. Far better initial buffering than youtube and the like (I'm on a 2Mo ADSL connection here only) and the image quality was great.
Unfortunately, at about 40% the playing point reached the end of the buffer, and for the rest of the video the download speed was horrible (like period of 2-3 sec of videos then 15-20 sec of buffer).
As a comparaison Youtube video playing point sometimes reaches the end of the buffer, but generally the playing point stay a little bit ahead.

This morning the video dont play with this error message : "NetStream.Play.StreamNotFound"

Jason Dunn
11-20-2008, 05:04 PM
I think the hardest part to get used to with your video was the Canadian accent. ;)

I don't know what you're talking abooooooot. Take you hoser, eh? :D

[I always find it funny when people say I have a "Canadian accent"...]

Jason Dunn
11-20-2008, 06:06 PM
More interesting discoveries: the fullscreen option not working is happening because TinyMCE, the rich text control we use in our custom CMS, is maiming the code and removing it. Same thing happens with WordPress, because it uses the same text editor. :mad:

rudedog71
11-20-2008, 06:08 PM
played fine for me.

sjosjo
11-20-2008, 07:50 PM
Starts immediately and no problems whatsoever. Just Fine.

Macguy59
11-21-2008, 04:45 AM
Played immediately and flawlessly to the end. I watched it at 9:30 PM Central Standard Time on my Unibody MacBook via 802.11n

Jason Dunn
11-21-2008, 05:05 AM
I'm talking with one of the MotionBox team members, and apparently they were doing some big back-end changes the day I posted this video playback challenge...so it looks like my timing was pretty bad. ;-)

For anyone that's monitoring this thread, give it another try - any better? The same?

bmurphy
11-21-2008, 07:55 AM
Played immediately and fine for me- I tried it twice, and I had no problems- the quality was great! the only thing that I noticed was that you didn't have the correction- about paying middle 500's for your MSI wind - that you had on YouTube.
As always, good review- but I really like the Mini 9- I've just bought one for another person- and I'm really thrilled that they have made it so it is so easy to upgrade- SSD, RAM, and wireless- or 3G, described on jkkmobile.com-

Robp
11-21-2008, 09:15 AM
Did not work for me. All I got was the black screen. I'll try again from home later this evening and reply again.

BATTY_1
11-21-2008, 10:13 AM
Worked well, took a bit of time to start but not unreasonable, quality was excellent.

mwfielder
11-21-2008, 03:50 PM
Had the 30 sec lag for me; didn't "autorun" once it had enough of the video loaded. Once it played, it played great for me. Connecting via cable modem/wifi at the house.

Robp
11-22-2008, 07:18 PM
Hi. I'm back. This time it worked flawlessly from my home ADSL (pretty slow 384 Kb/s) at 18:15 UST.

saru83
11-23-2008, 01:03 AM
worked flawless for me ;)

Don Tolson
11-24-2008, 09:50 PM
Hi Jason... I'm running this video from work, which usually has a pretty high bandwidth connection (BC Government, doncha know:D)

Anyway, I'm getting 'buffering' messages every 10 secs or so, and it takes about as long again (about 10 secs) for it to get going again.

Never saw this behaviour on the Youtube versions.

Quality is really good tho...

Don Tolson
11-24-2008, 10:16 PM
Hi Jason... I'm running this video from work, which usually has a pretty high bandwidth connection (BC Government, doncha know:D)

Anyway, I'm getting 'buffering' messages every 10 secs or so, and it takes about as long again (about 10 secs) for it to get going again.

Never saw this behaviour on the Youtube versions.

Quality is really good tho...

Update -- came in a second time, and maybe it kept downloaded material from the first, cuz this time, there was no lag or 'buffering' at all, and it downloaded material way before it got to playing it.

As mentioned before -- quality of voice and picture is excellent.

Jason Dunn
11-24-2008, 10:19 PM
Anyway, I'm getting 'buffering' messages every 10 secs or so, and it takes about as long again (about 10 secs) for it to get going again. Never saw this behaviour on the Youtube versions.

Thanks for reporting the test results. The buffering is a bandwidth problem, either on your end, or on their end - hard to say which. YouTube videos are usually in the 700 kbps range - the Motionbox videos I'm embedding are 1700 kbps, so they take quite a bit more bandwidth. Maybe someone was downloading something big on your network. :D

wocket
11-25-2008, 09:53 AM
Plays great. Just watched the unboxing video of the Touch Pro on a Mac Pro using Safari. Quality fantastic and smooth playback.

onlydarksets
11-25-2008, 05:01 PM
About two months ago, I purchased a <a href="http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&amp;fcategoryid=177&amp;modelid=16187" target="_blank">Canon HF100</a> high-definition video camera to replace my ageing but still totally sweet Canon GL2 (that thing has such great optics!). It took me a while to re-create my template in 16:9 format, but I did and published my first two HD videos to YouTube...and I was quite <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/91318/dell-inspiron-mini-9-netbook-unboxing-and-first-impressions.html" target="_blank">disappointed with the results</a>. YouTube only offers a 4:3 aspect ratio player, so 16:9 videos look pretty tiny with those big black bars on the top and bottom. I set out to find a better solution for embedding videos on Thoughts Media sites, and I think I've found one: <a href="http://www.motionbox.com/" target="_blank">MotionBox</a>.
How's this for timing: YouTube Now in Widescreen (http://www.geektonic.com/2008/11/youtube-now-in-widescreen.html)

ptyork
11-25-2008, 05:23 PM
How's this for timing: YouTube Now in Widescreen (http://www.geektonic.com/2008/11/youtube-now-in-widescreen.html)

Beat me to it by 15 minutes!! Here a sample. Not bad. Click "watch in high quality"...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5E7cIQDUwc

Supposedly they also support 720p in h.264.

jgrnt1
11-25-2008, 05:25 PM
Unlike a few days ago, I had no issues today with either video. The quality is fantastic. It's disappointing that fullscreen doesn't work. With YouTube videos, fullscreen is terrible, but with the higher quality video, I bet it would look pretty darn good.

Edit: I took a look at the widescreen YouTube video in high quality. It's not bad. I don't think it's quite the quality of the Motionbox videos, but I don't know if you shot them at the same quality.

gregh
01-07-2009, 10:31 PM
Jason,

I saw Motionbox restricting the embedded plays, could this explain some of the strange issues you've seen?

http://www.motionbox.com/content/help/premium-account

*Limitations on embedded plays: While Motionbox Premium membership is designed for personal use, we do have subscribers who use this service in a professional or hobbysit capacity. We encourage Premium members to post both SD and HD content on your blogs, profile pages, or websites, but this subscription does not include unlimited bandwidth. Premium members are entitled to 500 plays per video (up to 5000 total embedded plays) per month, regardless of quality (SD or HD)