Testing

To celebrate my last night of holidays, back at home, I'm testing a new Sidebar video player of a beach scene taped whilst away (full-sized video here).

This should start automatically and is looped to repeat once. If vision fails to start then click on screen...it's purely an experiment and needs refining.

If, however, you find the audio annoying then adjustments can be made using the controls at the bottom of the player (volume far left).

I'm interested to know if this gadget works in your browser and any opinions of it's worth. Otherwise a new Cablog video, Mower Heaven, to be posted tomorrow.

Regarding the Away challenge, four of the nine localities have already been identified though not the aforementioned beach. Competition will remain open over Easter.

Comments

[Jono]

Nice idea with the video, but it doesn't really work, for a couple of reasons

- on my large-ish (21in) monitor, the video is too small to make out many details
- generally putting any kind of item on the page with sound in it that the user doesn't expect is a bad idea.
- also, using quicktime to play the video isn't the best idea - firstly because it downloads and plays the movie all by itself (in Tel$tra's land of 200mb download limits, forcing a user to download a file like that isn't a good idea), and secondly because by the looks of it you're hosting the video yourself. If you're already putting stuff on vox.com, you may as well use it. On any vox video page if you click the "embed" link, you get some code you can copy into your blog post or template which embeds the vox video into your post. This is good because it a) allows the user to decide whether they want to download the video or not and b) it's hosted on vox, so you're not using any of your storage or bandwidth to play it.

[adrian]

Thanks for this precise summation, Jono, allowing me to reconsider. Agree that automatic download is a burden, despite being only 12MB, to many on limited usage. Thus I've disabled autostart with 'play' optional for now.

Unfortunately this blog host, Typepad, will only upload .mov files, hence the Quicktime player. The workaround is to host the video offsite at YouTube/Google/VideoEgg, etc and import the code.

Problem is that Vox don't provide any source code whatsoever, which is very frustrating. To date I've only used them as they're with the Typepad family and couldn't be bothered joining outside hosts. Until then I'm stuck with hosting vids at Vox. Will attempt to rectify this in near future.

Anyway thanks for your input, Jono, it's much appreciated.