Smartphones Show 8 live

Specifically, does anyone hear clicking near the start of the file? The MP4 is fine on my PC and N70 but when I play it through the web page I get clicks!

Is it just me?

Steve

slitchfield wrote:Specifically, does anyone hear clicking near the start of the file? The MP4 is fine on my PC and N70 but when I play it through the web page I get clicks!

Is it just me?

Steve

No i got it too. A strange thing though is that i looked at it quickly from work and don't remember any clicking. Now, at home, i can hear a lot of anoying clicks. Same config (Windows XP SP2 + firefox + latest quicktime version) the only difference being that at work i'm using headphone while at home i'm using my laptop's built-in speakers. A bit weird.

Anyway, it's really cool to be able to view video reviews, it gives a much better idea of what a device look like and how it behaves than looking at the usual glossy pics in print reviews.

A few point about the web site itself:

- I have not been able to find a page that gives a list of all the shows with their contents. If you want to find a particuliar review, you have to go through all the show pages one by one to find the one you're looking for. Very annoying. And it's going to become a lot worse when you'll reach 20 or so shows. An index page would take no time to do and be a huge improvement in usability

- You have embeded the quicktime player in the show pages themsleves which mean that whenever i click on a show link to view what it's about, the quicktime plugin starts loading. On slow machines this sometimes causes the whole browser to freeze for several second :icon13: It would be A LOT better to provide a link to the video instead of embeding quicktime in the show presentation pages

- One thing that i hate about quicktime is that, by default, it autoplay movies causing sound to unexpectedly blast in my speakers whenever i load a page with an emebeded quicktime movie. The first thing i do when i install quicktime is disable this silly behaviour in its options. But on your show pages, you are forcing the autoplay behaviour, overriding my preferences 😡 This is the kind of things i hate the most. Do not override the user's preferences. They're grown enough to decide by themselves how they want things to behave. Quicktime autoplays by default anyway and those who have explicitely modified the default options to not autoplay would certainly hate if a web developer decided that their movie would autoplay regardless.

- When you are viewing at a show page, there is no obvious visible way of telling at which show you are looking at. It might be a good idea to add a title with the show number at the top of the page.

>>No i got it too. A strange thing though is that i looked at it quickly from work and don't remember any clicking. Now, at home, i can hear a lot of anoying clicks. Same

Ah. Wierd!!! 8-(

>>- I have not been able to find a page that gives a list of all the shows with their contents. If you want to find a particuliar review, you have to go through all the show pages one by one to find the one you're looking for. Very annoying. And it's going to become a lot worse when you'll reach 20 or so shows. An index page would take no time to do and be a huge improvement in usability

Yes, an index page is next on my to-do list. I'll get it done in the next 24 hours.

>>its options. But on your show pages, you are forcing the autoplay behaviour, overriding my preferences 😡 This is the kind of things i hate the most. Do not override the user's preferences. They're grown enough to decide by themselves how they want things to behave. Quicktime autoplays by default anyway and those who have explicitely modified the

Ah, you mean I can take that option out and the movie will still load in the page? Thanks, I'll experiment!

Steve Litchfield

slitchfield wrote:
Ah, you mean I can take that option out and the movie will still load in the page? Thanks, I'll experiment!

I've never used the quicktime plugin myself but what i mean is that if you look at the source code of your page:

<EMBED
SRC="http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/downloads/smartphones-show/ss8.mp4"
HEIGHT="280" WIDTH="330" CONTROLLER="True" AUTOPLAY="True">

the autoplay is set to true. I supposed that if you removed the AUTOPLAY parameter altogether i would revert to the default behaviour. That is, it would autoplay just as it does now unless the user has set quicktime to not autoplay in which case the movie would preload but not start to play until the user actually clicks the play button.

Ah. I just tried that, removing AUTOPLAY, and it didn't seem to make any difference 8-(

Also (tara!) I just did an index to all shows, see the front page! 8-)

Steve Litchfield

No sign of the E61 or E70 reviews as neither device has actually arrived yet,

Bum!

I was looking forward to these reviews as I suspect my next phone will be one of them. I hope they turn up soon.

slitchfield wrote:Ah. I just tried that, removing AUTOPLAY, and it didn't seem to make any difference 8-(

I see that you've removed the AUTOPLAY on the show 8 page. Cheers, it now behaves as i expected. It's be great if you could remove it from the other show pages as well because they still keep autoplaying.

slitchfield wrote:
Also (tara!) I just did an index to all shows, see the front page! 8-)

Steve Litchfield

A big improvement indeed. It'd be even nicer if the different topics of a given show were presented in a bulleted list (as you can see, i'm kind of difficult to satisfy 😃 )

I'm torn about this autoplay thing. The problem is that Quicktime Player (or equiv) loads anyway. Whether it starts playing or not is a minor thing. The loading itself is the major time waster. But it's the only way to do it for newbies...... I'll carry on thinking about all this.

Just filmed my N91 video review, and got the Mio A701 to do tomorrow, going to try and get Show 9 out much quicker than Show 8. All I need now is an advertiser for it.... 8-)

Steve Litchfield