Monday, December 17, 2007

Tip For Slow Or Choppy Online Videos

Storyteller commented in yesterday's post that the videos were too slow and choppy for her computer. I figured I'd post my tip to her here rather than in the comments.

For slow or choppy online videos, try the following:

  • Click the "play" button.
  • Once the video starts to load, click the "pause" button and let the rest of the video load.
  • If you watch the status bar at the bottom of the video, (the bar with the pointer that tells you how far into the video you are) you can see the bar filling up.
  • Once the status bar is full and the video is loaded, click "play" again and the video will usually play through much better.
This will work for most online videos regardless of how old or slow a computer is. The key is to wait until the video has fully loaded before attempting to view it. Try it!

 

10 Comments:

MP said...

I have NEVER heard that before..you're kind of scary smart... LOL

******* said...

Hello! I grabbed the Mary Tyler Moore badge you made. Thanks, I love it! Should I put a link with it or what? I'm not sure of what I'm suppose to do. Let me know.

Melissa said...

mp: Kind of ;)

rosa: Hi! Welcome :)

Most people link the badge to NaBloPoMo, then make a quick mention of the badge in a post and let people know they got it from here (and link to me that way). Others haven't linked back to me at all, and that's ok too. Do whichever works best for you. And thank you for asking! :)

storyteller said...

#1 Hi and thanks Melissa - I'll give these a try. Life's been busy and I've not been spending much time visiting blogs during the past week. This information is most timely because I've experimented to day posting my first YouTube video at Small Reflections. I may add your advice there for my visitors, crediting you of course.

As for links ... I've linked my NaBloPoMo badges to you in posts, but I don't know how to create clickable links in the Sidebar. Do you know how I could do that?
Hugs and blessings,

Melissa said...

Use the following code:

<a href=" THE URL FOR YOUR LINK " > PUT THE TEXT OR THE IMAGE CODE FOR THE LINK HERE. WHATEVER YOU WANT PEOPLE TO CLICK ON </a>

Link codes all start with:
<a href=
Then the URL in quotes. Then:
>

Then the image or the text you want people to click on. Then:
</a>

Put these in an html/javascript widget or box.

storyteller said...

Thanks for instructions and I'm sorry to be a pest, but I'd like to know how to do this so ... here's what I did. I imported the badge into small reflections, copied the html code and inserted it (along with your URL) in what I believe to be the appropriate places. This is what I ended up with:

Hmm ... it won't let me put it here, so I'm going to try to put the whole thing between brackets and see what happens:

So ... that doesn't work either. I don't know how to get the information to you. Perhaps if I had your email address? Sigh! Mine is smallreflections@gmail.com

However, to finish my story of what happened ... when I added the code in an element using Java script, saved it & viewed my blog, all I got when I clicked on the badge was the badge itself on a separate page. It didn't take me here. So, what did I do wrong please.
Hugs and blessings,

Melissa said...

I'll post the answer here first in case others have similar questions (Then I can point them here in the future!) But if it still doesn't work I'll email you :)

Using the Yatta badge on your Sacred Ruminations Blog as an example, the following code would duplicate what you currently have there, but add a nablopomo link to your badge, and a link to my blog on the words " Thanks Melissa."

<a href="http://nablopomo.ning.com/"> <img src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_okDjWgwWPYE/R2UaCPf469I/AAAAAAAAAWg/FOYeK5wmTrk/S150/yattanablopomo07b.jpg"> </a>
<a href="http://partofeverything.blogspot.com/">Thanks Melissa</a>

If you'd like to center these, use the following code (I've added "div" tags on either end)

<div align="center">
<a href="http://nablopomo.ning.com/"> <img src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_okDjWgwWPYE/R2UaCPf469I/AAAAAAAAAWg/FOYeK5wmTrk/S150/yattanablopomo07b.jpg"> </a>
<a href="http://partofeverything.blogspot.com/">Thanks Melissa</a>
</div>

And one more thing to really confuse you ;) If you'd like those links to open in a new window, add a "target" to the link code. (Or just copy and paste what I've written below! If you want the links to open in the same window, use the code above.)

<div align="center">
<a href="http://nablopomo.ning.com/" target="_blank"> <img src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_okDjWgwWPYE/R2UaCPf469I/AAAAAAAAAWg/FOYeK5wmTrk/S150/yattanablopomo07b.jpg"> </a>
<a href="http://partofeverything.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Thanks Melissa</a>
</div>

Stare at these for a while and they'll start to make sense :)

Melissa said...

Note: If you're viewing the above code in a pop up window, you might need to make the window wider to view the entire code. If you're viewing it on the blog page, the code will wrap around.

storyteller said...

Thanks - you're right about staring at the code to gain some sense of things. Between Smiler's Blogging 101 class, my previous playing around adding things to my sidebar, and now this ... I'm beginning to see how things work ... sort of.

When I compare the code I got from your badge at Sacred Ruminations and the code you included here (which show up in my gmail box nicely as clickable links) I see differences I can't account for yet ... but I'll continue to study and eventually figure it out and/or ask for help.

At the moment, I've used the "centered" version to insert the badge in the sidebar at Small Reflections as an experiment. It works fine except the "Thanks Melissa" isn't all on a single line under the badge. Thanks appears to the right of the badge with Melissa underneath. The badge however looks like yours (unlike the one that looks stretched width wise that I posted back in early December down farther in the Small Reflections sidebar).

Thanks again for taking the time to help out an aging woman/newbie blogger like myself.
Hugs and blessings,

Melissa said...

Here's the thing with HTML code... most (but not all) HTML elements have opening and closing "tags." Tags are the things that are between these < > Most opening tags like
<a>
have a closing tag that looks identical but with a slash
</a>

So an opening div tag looks like this:
<div>
and a closing one looks like this:
</div>

Anything in between an opening and closing tag is going to be "acted upon" by those tags. It's like saying "Start doing something here" and "stop doing it here."

To start italicizing something you'd write
<i>
Then the words you wanted italicized. Then when you want the italics to stop, you put a closing italics tag.
</i>

Sometimes there's additional information that you need to add *inside* a tag. For example, the <a> tag is for links. But within that tag you need to put additional information. Like the URL which is identified by 'href'. So within the link tag you'd add the href information and write
<a href="http://partofeverything.blogspot.com">

It's still an <a> tag and it will need a corresponding </a> tag at the end of the item you want to link, but the opening tag has had the href information added to it.

The image tag is similar. (And this is one of those tags that doesn't really have a closing tag.)

The image tag is <img> but within that you need to add the location of the image:
<img src="url-of-your-image">
You can add alternate text to display if your image doesn't load:
<img src="url-of-your-image" alt="My Fabulous Picture">
And you can add other atributes like height and width and who knows what else.

So... re-read all this, study, and look at the code again and see if anything more falls into place :D

*Oh, and read the code on my webpage (or in the pop up comment window) instead of in your reader. Your reader might be stripping out some of the symbols you need to copy and paste.