OT: A little testing help please!

NickHope wrote on 2/25/2012, 1:37 AM

Can you guys tell me if the video on [url=http://stockfootage.bubblevision.com/] plays smoothly in Flash? When viewing in Flash it should say "Flash 9+ Required" to the left of "View in Quicktime".

On my main computer (XP x64, Flash Player 10) that 240p version stutters in Flash, but not in Quicktime. The 360p version that you get if you click the "View Full Demo" link does not stutter in either. On my other computer all 4 versions play smoothly.

Comments

rs170a wrote on 2/25/2012, 2:00 AM

Nick, everything plays smoothly on my machine (XP Pro, SP3).
I have version 11.1.102.62 of Flash and 7.6.8 of QuickTime player installed.
Running Firefox 10.0.2

Mike

NickHope wrote on 2/25/2012, 2:22 AM

Thanks Mike.

Grazie wrote on 2/25/2012, 3:08 AM

Watching in both Flash and QT. No problems at all.

Is the default audio set as "OFF"? Both in Flash and QT? I had to activate the Audio bars.

OK, watching on a 32" screen, from 3' away - marvellous work Nick. Loving every moment of your creativity. The humour and the sense of awe at what evolution has bestowed on us.

Marvellous . . . . . .

Graham "Grazie" Bernard

. . I have it running still . . . .

farss wrote on 2/25/2012, 3:22 AM

Plays out fine down here however like Grazie no audio by default.

Bob.

NickHope wrote on 2/25/2012, 3:37 AM

Thanks for testing and thanks for the praise Grazie.

Yes, the audio is off by default. I am not personally coding this sub-domain. I questioned that and the logic is that we should have either autoplay or sound but not both for the 240p version, since most viewers, do not like arriving at pages that play sound at them automatically. Further, that autoplay is probably more important than sound for this page. However audio is ON by default if you choose to open the 360p version with the "View Full Demo" link.

More results would be most welcome. There is one other facebook friend who gets stuttering on the 240p version apart from me.
but that sound should be ON for the 360p version, and that autoplay is probably more important than sound for prospective stock footage purchasers.

I'll download the 240p and 360p files and do a Mediainfo comparison on them.

ushere wrote on 2/25/2012, 3:55 AM

with bob - great quality too.

btw. i prefer audio OFF - there's a lot of times i click links that open in new tabs but i don't necessarily go to them immediately. if audio starts playing it's very irritating when there's 6 or more pages open and i have to find which it is ;-)

amendegw wrote on 2/25/2012, 5:07 AM

Ahhh... Lovely footage.

Plays smooth as silk on my laptop. Flash Player 11.1.102.62 installed. Viewed in IE9.

I must say I like the Flash image better than the Quicktime. The Quicktime does not appear as sharp & somewhat washed out. The difference is subtle, however, as I had to flip back-and-forth several times to confirm what my old eyes were seeing (and maybe it was just my builtin bias against Quicktime [grin]).

One other thing that may-or-may-not help when analyzing JW Player playback is the Quality Monitor Plugin It give statistics on detected bandwidth, dropped frames, etc. I've used it to analyze performance for Bitrate Switching See: Just a Horse

I love this testing stuff!

...Jerry

farss wrote on 2/25/2012, 5:18 AM

"There is one other facebook friend who gets stuttering on the 240p version apart from me"

One thing I did find was it took a few seconds to stream properly. That's technically not stuttering so I didn't mention it but maybe your friend has confused the two.

Bob.

craftech wrote on 2/25/2012, 6:02 AM

Plays fine in both Flash 10.2 and QT7.

Tested it on my slowest (normally used) computer.

Dell Vostro1500 laptop
Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5 GHZ
4GB Memory
Windows XP Home SP3

John

Barry W. Hull wrote on 2/25/2012, 8:48 AM

Flash 11.1.102.62
QT 7.7
IE9
Windows Pro 64bit

Took a few seconds of buffering, slightly more with QT, but both played smooth as silk.

Tom Pauncz wrote on 2/25/2012, 9:38 AM

Latest Flash, latest QT, FF 10.0.2, Win 7-64bit...
Plays beautifully (matches the footage :-)) small, full demo and full screen on 24" monitor in both Flash and QT. No stuttering at all.

Great work Nick!

Tom

Byron K wrote on 2/25/2012, 12:17 PM

Plays great in Chrome on an old Avertec 2100 / AMD Turion 64 / XP Pro.
Love the beautiful close-ups. Great quality and clarity.

NickHope wrote on 2/25/2012, 12:27 PM

Thanks for all the testing. It looks like I'm in a tiny minority then with the stuttering. I analysed the two video files and noticed that the smaller, stuttering 240p version uses format profile Main@2.1 while the larger, smooth 360p one uses format profile Main@3.0. I will suggest they re-encode the smaller one with Main@3.0 and see if it helps.

amendegw wrote: One other thing that may-or-may-not help when analyzing JW Player playback is the Quality Monitor Plugin It give statistics on detected bandwidth, dropped frames, etc. I've used it to analyze performance for Bitrate Switching See: Just a Horse

Just a horse but a nice one! I may well try embedding this stuttering video in a JW Player page of my own and see what happens. Might also try that quality monitor plugin. Thanks for the tip!

amendegw wrote: I must say I like the Flash image better than the Quicktime. The Quicktime does not appear as sharp & somewhat washed out. The difference is subtle, however, as I had to flip back-and-forth several times to confirm what my old eyes were seeing (and maybe it was just my builtin bias against Quicktime [grin]).

No, you're right. Both players are playing back the very same file, but the Quicktime Player, at least on a PC, does not "expand the levels" from [16,235] to [0,255] during playback like the Flash Player does, so you're seeing less contrast. On top of that, the Quicktime photo JPEG file that I sent them with blacks at 16 and whites at 235 turned into AVC/MPEG-4 files with blacks raised to 24 and a big increase in gamma on their Apple Macs. I will let them know about these issues, and suggest they phase out the Quicktime Player, but I've pretty much given up trying to control it since there are evil Apple computers and mysterious workflows involved.

On one of my screens where the Nvidia driver won't let me set full dynamic range, blacks in the Quicktime Player come out at 35 and whites at 220!

Regarding the actual stock footage itself, I did round-trip some of the master footage clips that I send them in Quicktime MJPEG-B to check for luminance shift. They rendered and returned Apple ProRes HQ files and they were virtually indistinguishable, so that's good.