can no longer jump to a point in a video

Forums Website News and Help can no longer jump to a point in a video

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  • #609067
    Robin Leadbeater
    Participant

    I am not sure if it is related to the website changes but I notice that you can no longer jump ahead to a specific time in the (non youtube) BAA videos by clicking on the progress bar so have to watch the whole video to get to the place you want. Particularly problematic here for example where the video is almost 3 hours long !
    https://britastro.org/videos/isis-tutorial

    #609077
    Callum Potter
    Keymaster

    I am not sure if it is related to the website changes but I notice that you can no longer jump ahead to a specific time in the (non youtube) BAA videos by clicking on the progress bar so have to watch the whole video to get to the place you want. Particularly problematic here for example where the video is almost 3 hours long !
    https://britastro.org/videos/isis-tutorial

    Thanks for this spot Robin – we’ll look into it.

    Callum

    #609078
    William Bristow
    Participant

    Hi Robin, Callum.

    The jump ahead is working for me using Safari Browser on a Mac, and also on iPad, but with a very long delay (eight minutes on a fast fibre connection), while the entire video up to the chosen jump point loads in the background, and the video only loads up to that point, viewing after that jump point is loaded and shown on demand.

    If you want to freely scroll through the video for a particular point without watching the whole thing then click on the scroll bar somewhere near the end of the video and wait while the video loads in the background, eventually the video will begin playing from the jump point you selected, once this happens you can freely scroll back and forwards over any part of the video that lies before that jump point.

    I have seen this behaviour with video content on several websites lately and it is due to a combination of the embedded video player that is used and the bandwidth allocated to the video stream on the website server.

    You might find it simpler, and much faster, to mouse-right-click on the video pane after it begins to stream and select “Download Video” which will copy the video content to your download folder as a .mp4 file, and then view that video in any suitable player where you will be able to search backwards and forwards in real time.

    The video you linked to is almost 0.9Gb and carrying out a download of the entire video this morning on a fast fibre connection took about eight minutes, and that is almost exactly the same length of lag that you will experience when jumping ahead to a point near the end of the video in the embedded video player that this BAA webpage is using.

    In comparison, a 2Gb video download from other streaming services (Apple TV, Netflix etc) takes just over a minute on my fibre connection here so it would appear that the BAA server is throttling download speed for the video content somewhat and combined with the embedded players requirement to load all the video stream up to the jump-to point is not providing a very user friendly experience.

    William.

    #609094
    Dominic Ford
    Keymaster

    From William’s description, my guess would be that the web server is not allowing partial-content downloads, and so the video player is not able to start downloading the video file part-way through. Hence, it has to download the whole preceding part of the video before the jump facility starts working.

    If this is the problem, it may be fixed by some lines like the following in the relevant htaccess file:

    Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin “*”
    Header set Access-Control-Expose-Headers “Content-Type”
    Header set Access-Control-Expose-Headers “Accept-Encoding”
    Header set Access-Control-Expose-Headers “Range”

    … with the last line being the particularly important one. However, WordPress possibly has a switch somewhere for controlling this behaviour.

    I vaguely recall seeing exactly this same problem on another website, many moons ago… possibly the previous BAA website, in fact!

    #609183
    stan armstrong
    Participant

    Dominic adequately deals with the Partial Content Download Aspect..

    William’s description of his Download Times is entirely expectable..
    although it contrasts dramatically with mine.
    On successive days since reading his posting.. I have downloaded
    at various times the full video file [0.9G] in less than 30 SECONDS.
    This Transit Speed is virtually the same as that for other Streaming Services.
    My Fibre Link is Cheapo Lowest grade and the Desktop PC is an 11 year old
    converted from Windows XP to Win 10. I only use my mobile phone for
    Phone Calls so cannot comment on mobile usage.
    Sad I know.. but I could not resist the curiosity urge to RETAB and test again.
    *********
    Full Video downloaded as MP4 in 29 Seconds at 16:16 PC Time.
    Tested video on Audio aspects [love the bit about ‘Negative Pixels’!] on jump..
    then took screen shot 8m from end.. Attached
    Posted 16:51 PC Time

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