Streaming Preview Services Restored

[GloryQuestor]

Thanks to the efforts of our Programming volunteers, we are happy to announce that our streaming previews are finally being restored to the website.

Before things broke we were using a Flash player and all encodes were encoded with a width of 480px. We now are using HTML5 video adaptive streaming using DASH and the videos are encoded at LQ: 240p @ CRF 27, MQ: 360p @ CRF 25, and HQ: 720p @ CRF 23. We won't upscale the video--if the video is less than 480p, then we skip the MQ encode and just do LQ and HQ.

Video playback should work in all major desktop browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer. IE supports MSE but the player doesn't seem to be working. We were unable to test with Apple Safari, but we believe it should work as well. Additionally, Chrome and Opera appear to have issues rotating images (see homepage in Edge or Firefox), but they will otherwise play the videos fine.

On mobile devices, playback works on Windows Phone 10 and Android. Playback on IOS does not work as Apple currently doesn't support MSE. Once Apple does add it to their browser support, it should work fine then.

Currently, we have our home page video queue working and are in the process of finishing up all videos that premiered in 2016 and 2017, which means previewing will be ready for our upcoming Viewer's Choice Awards. Other videos on the website will be restored over time as they are encoded for the new streamer. Embedding previews in a post has unfortunately not been restored, and once we do restore it video links will have to be updated. The administrators and moderators will be standing by to assist you when the time comes.

This is the first of many steps that we hope to take in regards to improving the site and user experience. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to announcing even more updates for 2017.

[Kireblue]

I also want to add that Corran and Derobert both deserve a major round of applause for the time and effort that they spent getting all of this to work. Since they don't post very often in the public areas of the forums, the work that they put into the site often goes unnoticed. But we all owe them our thanks and gratitude

[dokidoki]

I also want to add that Corran and Derobert both deserve a major round of applause for the time and effort that they spent getting all of this to work.

"Thanks." --Obama

And thanks from me too.

[Corran]

PS: We made some changes to the site's stylesheet. You may need to clear your cache to pull down the new css file if you see any weirdness on the video profile pages.

[ClaudiusVideo's]

oh god not HTML5 i mean sure it gives high quality videos but HTML videos are the slowest you'l be pausing the video several times to just play one 5 min video, i should know i been trying to watch new season of supernatural but cant over HTML videos being slower then my grandpa lmao.

anyways congratulations on someone at least trying to fix it by now

[ClaudiusVideo's]

one question tho i understand its gonna take awhile to get previews up for the existing videos but what about new ones
will it show up for any new videos we post cause most have been using other sites mostly youtube cause this site has been
dead since the previews and web upload went down

[Corran]

New videos will get encoded before existing ones.

"HTML 5 Video" doesn't affect video quality or the rate at which videos are downloaded. It is simply a tag (specifically <video></video>) in the webpage that broswers can support for adding video to a page. Before the video element was added to the html specs, the only way to add video to a webpage was with third party browser plugins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Actual playback will be done via MSE (Media Source Extension API) and the built-in browser's video decoders but that also does not download the video. The quality of the videos are determined at the time the video was encoded by the server. In this case, we have up to three qualities/resolutions at varying filesizes. The lowest quality is very small and should be fast to download while the highest quality is larger. The Dash.js library we use will estimate the bandwidth of the device downloading the video and choose which quality of video to use. If in the middle of playback the device's bandwidth changes, the Dash.js library will on-the-fly switch to a different quality level to ensure playback is not interrupted.

[seasons]