Preview player feedback/issues

It seems like we need a topic to keep track of feedback about and issues with the preview player. Ellen brought up a couple of current issues:

I noticed when I was on a DSL connection, the 60 second previews were sticking a bit- pausing and starting. I had to keep refreshing to get the content to stream.

Is anyone else having this problem with playback? If so can you let us know what kind of connection you are using and which browser (and version of flash if you know how to find that)

It seems like on several of the videos- most recently the playdough video, the sound is not on track with the visual. I dont know if this is a site issue or a video production issue.

If you see this, please post which videos you see it on and whether it is isolated to just the preview or is also on the purchased video.

Thanks for all your help!

Several changes have been made to the player in the last couple of weeks incorporating feedback from site users.

• The player’s size is larger both for preview and full-length playback
• You can now see the timecode change as you drag the selector along the time bar
• The buffering system is updated, so please let us know if you continue to have problems with stuttering video

I had no trouble with stuttering, it streamed really well. I’ve got dsl with a wireless network. my browser is firefox and my platform for this visit is mac os 10.3.9

size of video

for many of these topics people will be setting their laptop on a counter and working from it. The default download viewing window (320×240px) is really small, in practice it would be hard to refer to the video from several feet away for say, the workout or playdough piece, unless you increase the size, and for the vids that already have production value issues you lose resolution quality. resizing isn’t hard but it does require the viewer to fiddle with the size. (=distraction from just being able to watch and learn) For the better produced vids resizing works OK but looks lousy on the amateur ones (ie playdough) This may not be something that is fixable for now…

Viewing glitch: I had no trouble with viewing the vids when iTunes was my default. With Quicktime I can open the files I download to iTunes, But when Quicktime was the default ap they downloaded as a .mov and I could not open them, probably because I was trying to open them before they finished downloading. my bad.

Now I am having trouble getting iTunes back as the default. May need to stress that iTunes( or windows media) needs to be default and to be sure to finish download. Or may be that this is a Mac issue and only 10% of your customers might potentially experience it, although lots of windows peeps have iTunes and Quicktime on their machines. (and the apple evangelist in me says the mac use is on the rise esp. among home and education users, ie lots of your customers.)

thanks for letting me peek. Kala

Thanks for the feedback!

Videos are probably going to be 640×480 or 320×240 depending on how well they compress, but you bring up a good point. Maybe we should include instructions on how to enlarge the playback depending on which application you are watching it with.

It sounds like the issue with .movs probably was trying to watch them while they’re still downloading, but it might be good for us to help people out there in terms of giving them a clearer sense of what to expect. We’re currently leaning towards not having videos default to iTunes because not everyone has it and using it can be tricky in some cases. You can always put any lessons in iTunes by dragging the video onto the iTunes icon though (on the mac), dragging it into your library, or using import from the file menu.

Thanks for a lot of good points! We’re always interested in where we might be able to make the experience more seamless for our users.