A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

arghargh · 2005-10-30 21:22:12

Please (please, please) bring back the zipped mpegs. WMV is terrible -- slow loading, crappier quality -- and requires WMP9! Quicktime doesn't allow full-screen without buying "qt pro" which is ridiculous. Mpegs work everywhere (including on linux) and work on older media players. They also don't require the same terrible loading times that exist with WMV.

Direct links would also be much better on the front pages as they were before. That way you don't have to open a new window, then click the link, then close the window. This would save BA bandwidth as well since you don't get 1 automatic attempt to load the video and then another to actually download it.

Last, it appears you're loading pictures from a DB through PHP -- or at least passing them through it. Suggestion: don't do this. It's noticably slower, more processor intensive, and pointless. You can easily have a DB field which contains the actual thumbnail name, and then generate HTML to link to that image rather than having the PHP do everything. PHP is sexy, but not when it's slow.

blondie11 · 2005-10-30 21:38:35

I agree. bring back the zipped MPEGS. I know for a fact if they dont reappear. I will not renew what was a fabulous subscription. Sorry but that was one of the best things about this site.

al · 2005-10-31 06:55:49

arghargh wrote:

Mpegs work everywhere (including on linux) and work on older media players.

Not to mention standalone DivX players. Today they simply can't play wmv or mov. Avi could still be acceptable, but mpeg is just sweet.

Last edited by al (2005-10-31 06:56:21)

Kdogg2 · 2005-10-31 08:54:48

Wow, I find it hard to believe that you would end your subscription, just because there aren't zipped mpegs to download.

If you don't care for wmv, you could try a video converter and make it into the format of your choice.

Also if you have quicktime basic installed, do a google search for a ' Media Player Classic'

This program plays all media files and, can play quicktime files full screen.

Don't know if it runs on linux though.

I guess I was also just thinking in a windows environment and not a mac. I don't know if there is anythink like media player classic for mac.

Last edited by Kdogg2 (2005-10-31 09:21:51)

richard · 2005-10-31 13:13:30

arghargh wrote:

Please (please, please) bring back the zipped mpegs. WMV is terrible -- slow loading, crappier quality -- and requires WMP9! Quicktime doesn't allow full-screen without buying "qt pro" which is ridiculous. Mpegs work everywhere (including on linux) and work on older media players. They also don't require the same terrible loading times that exist with WMV.

The quality is determined not by the player so much as the settings we encode with. WMV and MPG are compressed in different ways, but the overall quality is not much different. One will have smoother transitions, the other will look nicer when there's less movement. But the 'loading times' are determined by your download speed, and I dont' see how WMV could be any slower.

arghargh · 2005-11-01 08:58:02

I _never_ view the videos in-browser. It's a terrible way to watch videos of any sort -- you can't doublesize them or fullscreen them. What I mean by slower loading is that if you take a WMV file and a MPEG file and you load each in windows media player, the WMV _always_ has a long lag time (up to 20 seconds) before it starts playing, while the MPEG starts virtually right away. This is due to the internal datastructures of each format, but makes WMV incredibly annoying (especially when dealing with instant-gratification types of media . It's also common for audio in WMVs to get out of sync with the video which on a site like this is not fun at all (the quicktimes do this occasionally as well -- the mpegs never do).

I read elsewhere that you called MPEG "outdated." Pure silliness. You used to provide a cross-platform, compatible format. Now you provide two proprietary ones that make the site less accessible and less enjoyable (enough so that I took the time to post about it here!).

richard · 2005-11-01 14:08:36

arghargh wrote:

I read elsewhere that you called MPEG "outdated." Pure silliness. You used to provide a cross-platform, compatible format. Now you provide two proprietary ones that make the site less accessible and less enjoyable (enough so that I took the time to post about it here!).

With respect, you are speaking for yourself - by replacing MPG with QT, we've made the site readily accessible to more people, and lined up with the vast majority of web sites that deliver video.

PC elmo · 2005-11-01 18:06:17

I think there's more to the picture here, so to speak. I haven't been able to compare QT, since I haven't been able to make it fill the whole screen, but the WMV does seem to have a sharper image, on the higher density end at least.

On its face, I agree that MPEG does not really appear to be "outdated," but I'm no expert in these areas. So, as I've suggested elsewhere, if those of us who still desire MPEG -- for whatever reason -- really are such a slim minority, maybe there's an extra step we can take on our end to keep us in the loop. We just need more info on what it is.

Is there an easy way (or any way) to convert WMV to MPEG??? That would pretty much do it.

The direct links are very helpful, by the way. I am concerned about the formats, but I see more going well with the site transition than not!

Snopes · 2005-11-01 19:10:38

-

For what it's worth, I was unhappy with the switch away from MPGs as well. MPGs play on many stand-alone DVD players, but QuickTime and WMV virtually never do

al · 2005-11-01 19:55:41

Yeah, as I said above. There is this minority we represent here. We are those freaks who use TV sets with standalone players, because we don't believe in the fun factor of watching films and videos with the support of a "vacuum cleaner".

Pugget · 2005-11-01 21:48:54

As a Linux user, I must also voice my vote for mpeg. QT is a closed format for which support is scetchy on Linux, and WMV9 support is non-existant to (at best) poor. I've got a MAC laptop too, so QT is okay on that, but one still losses full screen unless you pay Apple. And fat chance that's going to happen just to watch a movie full screen, something that should be free.

johnnyd · 2005-11-02 00:27:47

PC elmo, just wanted to mention that conversion is NOT the best solution here. If you do this you are recompressing the video and this will degrade quality. Let's face it, we all want the picture to look as good as possible - the resolution of the video is only a part of this. To get the best quality, you need to start from the source which is the original DV videotape and compress from there. Unfortunately, that means for the best quality MPG, the people who run the site need to make it available in that format (compressed from the original tape).

jamesd · 2005-11-02 03:44:44

PC elmo,

No, there's no really easy way to convert WMV or QT to MPEG, though that would be the first thing I'd want to do, because both WMV and QT are untrustworthy formats for the buyer - both have copy protection which can at an arbitrary time deprive you of what you appear to have purchased. As johnnyd mentions, such changes form one CODEC to anotehr inevitably decrease quality, but it is worth it to get something which you know won't vanish later.

Richard,

Longer loading times are normal for both WMV and QT using typical CODEC settings, compared to MPEG. Fewer key frames are the norm with them and that means you can't do things like click to instantly move to any part of a video. You can reduce the effect by choosing short keyframe intervals in the encoder settings.

MPEG2 isn't outdated. It's key to the DVB standard for digital broadcast television, currently in early service in many places. In the UK, the first broadcasts using it were in 1998 and it's now penetrated abou 50% of all households. It's also, by far, the most portable of the compressed video formats.

The switch away from MPEG is discouraging. It was one of the significant attractions of the site and played a substantial role in my deciding to purchase the material.

I'm curious about the uplink switch - the place I'm involved with is spending hours at 400 megabit/s and surging to it's 1gig uplink limit occasionally. Not much video there, though.

al,

I wouldn't be very quick to believe claims that it's a minority. There was a similar majority of "minority" comments over at abbywinters.com.

PC elmo · 2005-11-02 18:43:46

johnnyd wrote:

PC elmo, just wanted to mention that conversion is NOT the best solution here. If you do this you are recompressing the video and this will degrade quality. Let's face it, we all want the picture to look as good as possible - the resolution of the video is only a part of this. To get the best quality, you need to start from the source which is the original DV videotape and compress from there. Unfortunately, that means for the best quality MPG, the people who run the site need to make it available in that format (compressed from the original tape).

I'm sorry to hear that, but it doesn't really surprise me. My hope is that not all is lost.

While I do not entirely understand the attraction of the formats chosen (a rather academic point, now), I do understand that the BA gurus have their hands full with what they have chosen. I do not expect them to resolve this for us. I could be wrong, but I think this one's up to the users.

So, is there such a thing as video converter or not?

As for quality, how much of a drawback that is depends on how much one would lose by converting. I know with still pictures that, though converting between formats can reduce quality, the reduced-quality images can still be as effective as other images of the same converted-to format. It depends on how much higher the quality was of the pre-conversion format, and the new WMV's here are pretty high quality.

I'm willing to try it. I just need an "it" to try.

johnnyd · 2005-11-03 02:47:18

Hi PC elmo. I looked around to see if I could find a free WMV to MPG converter. The only thing I could find is something called FX MPEG Writer - http://fxmpegwriter.com/. I tried it out and it seems to work fine - the quality seemed pretty good to me. There are lots of others out there as well but most of them are commercial products or shareware. Hopefully this will meet your needs.

Garybob · 2005-11-03 04:28:23

Well, I'd like to join the team who preferred the Mpegs. Arghargh is correct in that it does take more work to get to the video clips with the new format. Before the change over, I could clik on the newest update, login and start downloading right away. Now we have to jump through extra hoops which is really frustrating. I know it took a lot of time and effort, not to mention money, for you Richard to make the changes you recently did. However, it appears so far that while it may have felt right for you, your paying customers are not so happy.

Do what you want Richard but in my business I have a policy...."If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" What's the point of upsetting your repeat customers unnecessarily? If you can't sell it to your patrons, get rid of it. That's my two cents for what it's worth.

richard · 2005-11-03 06:22:43

Garybob wrote:

Well, I'd like to join the team who preferred the Mpegs. Arghargh is correct in that it does take more work to get to the video clips with the new format. Before the change over, I could clik on the newest update, login and start downloading right away. Now we have to jump through extra hoops which is really frustrating. I know it took a lot of time and effort, not to mention money, for you Richard to make the changes you recently did. However, it appears so far that while it may have felt right for you, your paying customers are not so happy.
Do what you want Richard but in my business I have a policy...."If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" What's the point of upsetting your repeat customers unnecessarily? If you can't sell it to your patrons, get rid of it. That's my two cents for what it's worth.

Under each face is now a DL link which enables you to do exactly what you did on the old site.

As for your policy - well the old site worked, sure, but now we give you Confessions, we give you improved filtering, we give you a personalised page, we give you a choice of image size, and we give QT's for the Apple people. That has to be worth a few minutes effort to find a media player that works in your browser. There may still be bugs at our end, but as long as we can identify what they are, we'll fix them. Right now the only consistent problem seems to be OSX and Safari, and that is only 3 users. We're looking into that one.

PC elmo · 2005-11-05 07:04:33

johnnyd wrote:

Hi PC elmo. I looked around to see if I could find a free WMV to MPG converter. The only thing I could find is something called FX MPEG Writer - http://fxmpegwriter.com/. I tried it out and it seems to work fine - the quality seemed pretty good to me. There are lots of others out there as well but most of them are commercial products or shareware. Hopefully this will meet your needs.

... ... mm, I'm gonna have to get back to you on that one. So far, all it does is hang after about 2 seconds. That's when I tell it to go. If I don't uncheck the preview box, it'll do that as soon as I select a source file. It doesn't make me eager to buy the full version, that's for sure.

. . .

Garybob · 2005-11-06 15:31:00

Richard:

I just re-read my comments and I have to say, it almost sounds like I was being an ass. I surely didn't mean to be rude, only offer a suggestion or two. My apologies if I seemed unnecessarily brash.

Garybob · 2005-11-06 15:32:12

By the way, thanks for adding the dl links. It does make a real difference!

Iso · 2005-11-06 21:17:07

The only issue I have is that some of the older clips (Agonies #1 and #19 are the only one's I've sampled), have horrible quality compared to the original MPEG ones. The newer WMV clips (even the ones only available in Medium quality) are, IMO, superior to the MPEGs. So, if you can reencode the the early ones, that's would be all I'd suggest. <shrug>
Other than that I like the new site format and I'm glad to have the ZIPs gone.

Last edited by Iso (2005-11-06 21:17:50)

richard · 2005-11-06 23:34:59

Garybob wrote:

Richard:
I just re-read my comments and I have to say, it almost sounds like I was being an ass. I surely didn't mean to be rude, only offer a suggestion or two. My apologies if I seemed unnecessarily brash.

No, not at all.

Socks-AdultSiteSurfer.com · 2005-11-11 06:41:15

Couple of points as an adult site reviewer, as I've seen hundreds and hundreds of sites. I really liked having the small DL buttons, but thought you should also include them beside sets that have a confessions video as well. I had to start streaming the video and cancel if I remember right in order to download a confession. That's just wasting bandwidth on your end.

Second, I also prefer MPG. It is truly the universal standard, and I almost always choose this option over WMV if given one. WMV Seem to be a little hit and miss, but depending on the encoder mostly. I've seen really bad ones (in 600mb files even!) that look completely interlaced, horizontal lines all over the place, etc. I think this is an encoding issue more than anything though.

All in all, you can't please everyone, and I'd suggest stop trying. If you have the time/resources/patience/willpower to offer the videos in all of the formats, because you're just a super nice guy, then by all means. If not, pick a direction, and choose carefully before leaving it.

richard · 2005-11-11 13:53:02

Socks-AdultSiteSurfer.com wrote:

Couple of points as an adult site reviewer, as I've seen hundreds and hundreds of sites. I really liked having the small DL buttons, but thought you should also include them beside sets that have a confessions video as well. I had to start streaming the video and cancel if I remember right in order to download a confession. That's just wasting bandwidth on your end.
Second, I also prefer MPG. It is truly the universal standard, and I almost always choose this option over WMV if given one. WMV Seem to be a little hit and miss, but depending on the encoder mostly. I've seen really bad ones (in 600mb files even!) that look completely interlaced, horizontal lines all over the place, etc. I think this is an encoding issue more than anything though.
All in all, you can't please everyone, and I'd suggest stop trying. If you have the time/resources/patience/willpower to offer the videos in all of the formats, because you're just a super nice guy, then by all means. If not, pick a direction, and choose carefully before leaving it.

Thanks Socks, we might take up that idea of adding a DL link to Confessions, and to Overkill as well.

One of the problems with MPG, I've found, is that media players don't give a progress indicator. We used to get complaints from people saying their media player would just sit idle, when in fact it was loading the file, which would take anything up to an hour on dialup. And if I recall correctly, MPG-1 format wouldn't buffer either.

PC elmo · 2005-11-11 23:34:35

richard wrote:

One of the problems with MPG, I've found, is that media players don't give a progress indicator. We used to get complaints from people saying their media player would just sit idle, when in fact it was loading the file, which would take anything up to an hour on dialup. And if I recall correctly, MPG-1 format wouldn't buffer either.

That sounds like where a distinction arises between streaming and downloading. I could be wrong, but I think most of those crying out for MPG would be OK with it as download-only (if that's possible).

As for the conversion theory, I'm not having much luck. There's still a lot to check out, but so far ALL the programs available as free downloads are just demo versions of products for sale, including the one johnnyd offered above. That in itself is not bad (the range for the products is $19 to $40 U.S.), but it would help if one of them actually worked. The one I tried today did produce an mpg (a first), but it was really poor quality. I also could not use the agonies as source files (it would only take the confessions without an error). Some settings might help with both those issues -- if it had any!

I'm wary of going on a downloading/installing spree, with malware and such, but there's got to be a solution to this somewhere....

#1 2005-10-30 21:22:12

A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#2 2005-10-30 21:38:35

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#3 2005-10-31 06:55:49

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#4 2005-10-31 08:54:48

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#5 2005-10-31 13:13:30

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#6 2005-11-01 08:58:02

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#7 2005-11-01 14:08:36

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#8 2005-11-01 18:06:17

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#9 2005-11-01 19:10:38

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#10 2005-11-01 19:55:41

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#11 2005-11-01 21:48:54

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#12 2005-11-02 00:27:47

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#13 2005-11-02 03:44:44

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#14 2005-11-02 18:43:46

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#15 2005-11-03 02:47:18

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#16 2005-11-03 04:28:23

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#17 2005-11-03 06:22:43

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#18 2005-11-05 07:04:33

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#19 2005-11-06 15:31:00

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#20 2005-11-06 15:32:12

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#21 2005-11-06 21:17:07

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#22 2005-11-06 23:34:59

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#23 2005-11-11 06:41:15

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#24 2005-11-11 13:53:02

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

#25 2005-11-11 23:34:35

Re: A plea for mpegs and direct links, and a suggestion about PHP

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