I've just uploaded my first video (an on screen presentation using creenflow) and have embedded it on my Wordpress blog.
Sometimes the video looks crisp but when pausing / rewinding it can suddenly look very blurry after which is gradually gets clearer again.
The player I'm using uses adaptive streaming and the display is set to stretch proportionately to fill the display ("parts can be cut off").
It's a bit random and at first I thought it was my eyes.
What could be causing it?
Thanks I'll take another look.
One more question, is it better to export from Screenflow at the same dimensions of my Bits on the Run player (600 x 400) or as 100% (1280 x 800) in order to ensure crispness.
It's still pretty blurry when I comare it to the same video on YouTube.
Should I perhaps adjust the streaming to progressive and not adaptive?
It turns out that progressive streaming worked better. You can see the video at http://www.emarketeers.com/e-insight/using-twitter-search-effectively/
Question about social sharing at the above URL:
1. Twitter - doesn't publish the video title when tweeting. Can this be fixed?
2. Facebook - when sharing it used to pull in the video screenshot but now it doesn't. Any clues?
For screencast type of content it is in many cases better to use progressive, as screencasts are low bitrate enough that dynamic streaming isn't really necessary.
It is not possible to publish the video title when sharing through Twitter, but that might be a reasonable thing to consider for a future version of the sharing functionaliy.
I think it doesn't pull the video thumbnail anymore because your opengraph tags overrule the opengraph tags from the preview page. It is best to copy the opengraph tags on a video preview page and add them to the head of the page that you embed the video in.
Thanks Remco.
I think the additional Twitter functionality would be useful and I've seen a few people mention it on this forum.
Re the video thumbnail I only recently added the OG tags but they didn't work so i have removed them. It's so odd as yesterday my trial video worked fine in Facebook but this one doesn't.
What do you mean by a video preview page?
One last question, how do I locate the thumbnail URL which I understand Bits On The Run generates?
In the embed dialog you see a button "preview". This links to the preview page.
All the thumbnails are based on your video key, you can find the complete url scheme for thumbnails on http://developer.longtailvideo.com/botr/system-api/urls/thumbs.html
If always clears up, it is possible that your connection speed fluctuates a bit, which might mean that after a seek the load is a bit too slow, which would cause the player to bitrate switch down, while, when you play back continuously, the buffer does not get under the threshold that would cause a bitrate switch down.