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Kirill Kovalchuk
2,533 PointsVideo quality is too good for my bandwith
Hey, guys. I guess most of the people here don't have this issue, but my problem is sometimes videos stuck at some point and it takes some time to resume because my Internet channel ~7mbps which seems to be not enough or probably I'm too far away from the servers (I'm from Vladivostok). Thus my question is: do you plan to deliver videos in various qualities (like on youtube I can pick 420p and it runs good)? It's kind of irritating listening a 10-seconds part of the video and than it stucks for 2 seconds and than you watch another 5 seconds of the video and it stucks again.
P.S. Just don't get me wrong, please - it's not a complaint, just a question.
7 Answers
danielcroft
7,438 PointsYou could download the videos then watch them i guess? on the right hand site there is download links for the videos then watched them from harddrive
http://teamtreehouse.com/library/css-foundations/selectors/type-selectors just tryed on this one 11min video only took me 2 seconds to download might take you a couple of mins but its only a 13mb file
James Barnett
39,199 PointsYou can either download them one at a time as Daniel Croft-Bednarski suggested or use iTunes which makes it easier to download a whole course.
danielcroft
7,438 PointsI was going to say Itunes but I wasnt sure if that was just for the treehouse show. Least I know my self now :)
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsDownloading is one answer but Treehouse probably should be dealing with this problem themselves. I'm assuming part of Treehouse mission is to be accessible to many folks who can't afford a "formal" education, so many people in those areas are also going to suffer from stiff Internet caps. Perhaps you could provide a way to mark in your settings whether you want hi-res or low-res videos. This could interfere with a few videos that rely on a lot of text editing but that seems like something that should be solved at the screencast level and probably not by relying on high resolution.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsIt seems like down sampling the hundreds of videos that already exists on Treehouse and then uploading them would be a good bit of work for someone at Treehouse.
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsWell that's why they get paid.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsPaul Graham - Yep that's where return on investment (ROI) / priorities come in, as there are only so many hours in the day. I don't work for Treehouse so this is just my 2 cents.
Jessica Budd
8,308 PointsAbsolutely, it's actually really disappointing that they havent a) thought of this b) addressed this issue. We aren't all in the US with awesome fiber speeds and cheap data caps and this is a paid service.
And people have been requesting this feature for at least 3 years at this point!
Pablo Litardo
6,241 PointsYou should really just download them, it only takes a couple secs, Paul Graham why would they make low-res videos when downloading them is a actually better solution where you can view it in high-def ?
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsBecause that doesn't address the severe caps in some parts of the world, only the bandwidth.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsI guess the question should be can they still the other parts of the site. Treehouse isn't the lightest website in terms of page sizes. So the question should be what's the target bandwidth & latency upper limits to support because the code challenges as do probably need a connection that doesn't have particularly high latency.
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsThat's a good point because I'm not sure how the videos are served but when the pages load slowly or I pause the video, I can almost never resume them or they'll stop halfway. I almost wonder if the streaming server doesn't dump the connection when too few bytes are passing through it.
Scott Reuber
Courses Plus Student 12,756 Points"You should really just download them, it only takes a couple secs" Just throwing this out there, but anyone working with the web would do well to not make assumptions such as this.
I don't have the speed issues now that I've moved to a place that has better-than-stone-age Internet access, but before then, the videos were nigh unwatchable. Downloading (which was the route I went) actually took quite some time for just the standard def videos. Thankfully now I just get what I need as I need it, but I definitely see where Paul is coming from.
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsI'm coming from two perspectives on this. One, most of what I get paid to do is consultation regarding front-end responsive and mobile sites. So I'm always thinking mobile, ALWAYS. Given the demo shifts, I'm convinced I'm right about this. Not "burn the witches" right, but pretty damn firm in my convictions. The web is shifting drastically to a mobile web. I manage a site right now that has about 120K uniques per month. One year ago mobile traffic was about 25% of the total. Now it's 42% and climbing.
Two, my mother in law is a former luddite who we gave a T-mobile tablet to. She's only on cellular data so while that's maybe a tiny slice of users, it's something that in 10 years I would think will be a totally normal situation. I mean look at this upcoming Nexus 12, throw a keyboard on it and it's a computer. This sort of setup will become the default at home for a lot of people quite soon.
Kirill Kovalchuk
2,533 PointsAlright, guys, thank you in participating in this topic conrtibuting your two cents to the discussion of my issue. It seems like iTunes feed is the best option for me now. Downloading videos is a bad idea because it takes like 3 minutes to download 2 minutes video, now imagine what it is to download a 20-minutes course consisting of 10 2-minutes videos. In iTunes I can easily download the whole course and it seems like it loads faster.
Sohail L.
2,507 PointsWell it's really unfriendly that teamtreehouse doesn't have this functionality to just choose your prefered quality, at least there should be an option in user setting profile to set a global value for this.
Dylan Sharp
6,387 PointsI must agree. I'm quite disappointed at this. I thought it would be simple thing to add that functionality. Maybe I'd know if I could watch the videos ;)
denizaytac
511 Pointsi must agree too.. have limited bandwith in my dorm.. :((
Matthew Bingham
11,927 PointsMatthew Bingham
11,927 PointsOccasionally my bandwidth is not good enough to watch the videos either and I've personally downloaded the videos via iTunes - the only issue I see with this is that it doesn't update your badges and scores, so you have to navigate to the video on treehouse, run and skip to the end of the video to update the score/badge on your profile.
Scott Reuber
Courses Plus Student 12,756 PointsScott Reuber
Courses Plus Student 12,756 PointsI may be mistaken, but I don't think watching the videos and marking those as complete actually affects your score. Could be wrong though, but I went through the Photoshop courses earlier today and just tested ahead since I knew most of it already, and then just now tried skipping through a bunch of the videos. They changed to completed, but no score change.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsJames Barnett
39,199 PointsYou don't get points for watching videos, however you won't get the points for completing a badge unless all the videos in that badge are marked as complete.
Scott Reuber
Courses Plus Student 12,756 PointsScott Reuber
Courses Plus Student 12,756 PointsWeird, I just did them all for one badge set and nothing happened.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsJames Barnett
39,199 PointsScott Reuber - You haven't completed a badge until you complete any quizzes and code challenges that are part of the badge. Or am I misunderstanding something here?
Scott Reuber
Courses Plus Student 12,756 PointsScott Reuber
Courses Plus Student 12,756 PointsYou're misunderstanding. I am saying that watching & completing the videos online (complete with the green checkmark), which you said counts towards completion in your previous post ("however you won't get the points for completing a badge unless all the videos in that badge are marked as complete"), does NOT affect the score. As I have understood it, marking the videos as complete doesn't matter, you get the badges and points for completion with just the quizzes and code challenges even if you have some videos listed as not-viewed. The only difference is you'll have some gaps where you should have green checkmarks, which seems to be purely aesthetic.
To test, I returned to a badge-set where I had already completed the quizzes ahead of time and had skipped the videos. Got the badge and the points the first time through, and going back to watch the videos just a bit ago and have them marked as complete didn't do anything.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsJames Barnett
39,199 PointsScott Reuber - Got it. That's really good to know. Thanks!