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Video Player can now be Sized

5votes

Posted by: Shiv Kumar

Views: 2016Favorited: 0 Comments: 9

August 11, 2009 06:10 PM

Filed Under: New Feature

Tags: XR Video Player

Due to member demand (and I do mean demand) we modified the XR Video player to allow sizing.

Before I go on I'd like to say, "Be careful of what you ask for".

Now that I have that off of my chest let me also let you know about a few things you should be aware of.

1. Sizing a video to a size that is not it's natural encoded size hampers playback performance. You see your CPU not only has to decode each frame as it's playing the video (typically 30 frames per second) it will also have to re-sample each frame to the new size before showing it. That's a lot of processing power.

2. Since XR video quality is by far the best (as far as we know) our videos will tax the CPU even more. So while You Tube and others have allowed re-sizing their videos we've not, because during our testing we found that we could give you better video quality without the stutter/jerking if we encoded videos and played them back at the sizes we offer. But as I said, due to popular demand we're now allowing resizing videos.

Here are a few points to take note of.

1. Always re-size the video to the exact aspect ratio of the original. So make sure you've checked the exact dimensions of your video (we show you that on information the Asset Display Page) and then calculate the re-sized dimensions accordingly.

2. Ideally, the width and height are both multiples of 4, 8 or 16 (16 being the best)

Here are the possible dimensions (divisible by 16)

256x144

512x288

768x432

1024x576

1280x720

3. The Video and poster frame (thumbnail image) will maintain their aspect ratios but the player can extend beyond those dimensions.

4. We don't yet allow for customizing the embed codes. That is we don't have a user friendly way of customizing the embed code yet. So for now, please modify the code manually.

5. The WordPress plug-in does not support this new feature yet but will very soon.

Update:

The WordPress plug-in now supports the width attribute. Please note that the plug-in per-se does not need to be updated. The update is purely on our servers. So if you've installed the plug-in you don't need to get a new version. simply add the width attribute. You may want to check out this news group thread: WordPress Plug-in for more information

Comments

Lyceum Theatre

August 12, 2009 06:04 AM

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!

Thanks XR! :-)

Karel Bata

August 13, 2009 10:47 AM

5 stars!

Karel Bata

August 14, 2009 08:16 AM

Just noticed that those folk that embedded before the changes to the player still have the old design. Is that deliberate?

If so, you get a big nod of approval from me! (Surprise!) There's few things worse than designing a web page only to find later that someone else has changed things without asking, or sometimes even without telling you (like those annoying people at VIRB keep doing!)

Shiv Kumar

August 14, 2009 08:30 AM

Karel,

Do you mean that you're seeing the old player? If so, yes, we're mantaining both player for now and will for the next 6 months. Since we can monitor how many videos (and from where) are using the old player, we may be able to pull support for it earlier.

We do try, but it's not always easy or possible :).

Marc Bracelet

September 30, 2009 12:07 PM

So coollllllllll.........

Thank's a lot

Glenn Thomas

October 02, 2009 01:33 AM

Hi Shiv, I just tried this on my site http://avene.org and it works ok, but there's aliasing that isn't visible with other players. For example the previous video further down that page I posted from Vimeo which is 500x281 and obviously doesn't stick to the 16's rule. But it looks good.

The XR player I first tried at 496x272 which was as close to 500 wide as I could get (blog post width), but noticed the aliasing. So I then set it to 512x288 which cuts off part of it at the right, but found the aliasing is still there. Possibly because the original file is bigger, where as the I think Vimeo and Facebook videos which look ok on my site are 480 wide, so there's nothing to be removed?

Ideally I would resize the site to fit 640 wide content, but I have a lot of old photos there dating back a number of years from Flickr that are 500 wide.

By the way, what happened to the share on Facebook option? I use to use to promote my XR videos to friends and family on FB.

Shiv Kumar

October 02, 2009 01:55 AM

Hi Glenn,

The divisible by 16 rule applies more during compression (smaller files size for better quality) than at the time of resizing, but does apply to resizing in that the player has to resample the images during playback.

The issue you mention happens with video (no matter which website). But it's more prominent the more you have to reduce the size. That was another reason we didn't want to allow resizing. You also tend to get shining edges when you resize and depending on the the scene the shining is more obvious. Oh well, the "deed is done" if you get what I mean.

The XR player looks sexy on your site I must say!

Andy Lunn

October 06, 2009 05:26 AM

What sizes would that be if you wanted to crop to widescreen hd format?

Shiv Kumar

October 06, 2009 05:46 AM

Andy, just so I'm clear about your question - You do mean "crop" right? If so, then that's again determined at the time of encoding, or using the XR crop feature where we crop at the time to transcoding which amounts to the same thing.

You've mentioned two terms, "HD" and "Widescreen" and since they both mean something in the industry:

HD - 1920x1080 and 16:9 aspect
Widescreen - 2.35:1 aspect.

You get a video of 1920x817 (which should really be 1920x816 because you want even numbers for dimensions)

I'm not sure I'm answering your question, but let me just say that when you do use the re-size option of the player, you just need to specify the width. The player makes a request to the XR database and figures out the aspect ratio of your specific video (in real time) and adjusts the height as per the aspect of your video.

Given that we allow you to crop your video (when you upload your video) you don't have to do that part either.

In the early days of XR (before there was a public website) we were debating the dimensions we should be offering and initially had:

Low - 512x288
Medium - 768x432
HD - 1280x720

Both some folks said the medium was too big. It also requires a higher bit rate and therefore filesize as well as viewer bandwidth in order to the keep the percieved quality the same across all dimensions and so we settled on 640x360 instead (for the Medium).