Tech Forum

I'm probably not a good test case because of my connection speed, but other than the initial buffering time, the videos played fine for me. I was annoyed, however, that there seemed to be no way to play them in full screen mode.

I am in Oregon, with a 5/2 Mbps connection.

The site (with the video and audio features) are speed to me. It's a cool program!!! I will be happy if the Church "can" export it to international areas...

Thanks for the feedback. This is very helpful. One of the issues we have been hearing is that our servers which provide the videos are slow. Some people claim to have very fast connections (1-3 Mbps) and can download from other servers very quickly, but get less than 100 Kbps from our servers.

Can anyone validate this? We know the videos are large, and we're trying to address that (the size was cut in half a couple of days ago), but we're concerned that there may be an issue with our network or servers.

Thanks for any help you may provide.

Best regards,
Tom Kofford

At a quick glance, I don't see any easy way to see the actual download speed without resorting to sniffing packets. Is there something I should be looking at?

If I download the QT (mp4) movie files (the same one that is "streamed") using the default firefox download manager, at the end of the details line in parentheses it shows the current speed. In the attached screenshot the speed is 2.9 MB/sec. There are other download managers that allow you to specify/use multiple download threads, etc., and show you the speed. These numbers aren't exact, but should provide enough info to draw some conclusions.

For comparison, you might want to download something from servers somewhere else that show you that your connection is capable of faster speeds.

I'm not sure how to test the streaming, but for me it takes the same amount of time to buffer the entire video as it does to download the mp4, so I'm guessing they're the same. That's a big assumption.

EDIT - I just realized that the streaming mp4 files are now smaller than the downloadable files in an effort to speed up streaming. Anyone know how to calculate the download speed for a streaming QT file from a flash application? For now, just try downloading the QT file and we'll see what info we can get from that.

Thanks for any help!

Tom

I watched 8 or 9 of the videos and saw the DL speed vary from about 0.8Mb/s to 1.5Mb/s over the couple of hours I was viewing. I estimate the overall average to be 1.2Mb/s. It only stuttered once near the beginning of one video where the DL speed was averaging ~0.8Mb/s, but soon after that the speed picked up and it was able to spool ahead.

Mike
Comcast 8Mb/s DL link
Windows Vista Ult.
Firefox 3.0.5
Similar results with IE7 (7.0.6001.18000).

I am in the Netherlands and my wife is in the YW presidency here. We had planned to show one or two of the "Brand New Year" videos for an activity tomorrow night, but the buffering interruptions make it very difficult to enjoy. Is there any way to download the videos as MP4, WMV, MPEG, etc?

dbriscoe wrote:I am in the Netherlands and my wife is in the YW presidency here. We had planned to show one or two of the "Brand New Year" videos for an activity tomorrow night, but the buffering interruptions make it very difficult to enjoy. Is there any way to download the videos as MP4, WMV, MPEG, etc?

Go to the "Watch the Videos" page and find the video(s) you would like to download. For each video you will see two small icons just below the thumbnail picture of the video. One is labeled "WMV" and the other is labeled "QT". Clicking the WMV icon will start the download process for the WMV (Windows Media Video) format file. Clicking the QT icon will start the download process for the QT (Quick Time) format file.

Note: Clicking either format icon to download the video will open a popup window. For Internet Explorer you must have popups enabled. If nothing happens when you click one of the file format icons you probably do not have popups enabled. You can temporarily turn on popups several ways. The quickest way is to click the second from the left empty box at the bottom of the IE browser window and then select "Turn Off Pop-up Blocker". When you are done downloading you can click the same box and select "Turn On Pop-up Blocker" to return to the original setting.

If needed, here is additional test data.

My Speed


My Test Download


I usually download anywhere from 1.5 to 5 Mb/sec from other video sites.