I have a <video> element at the top of my page playing an animation in the background (very similar to the one found on the Google Hangouts page). On most computers, the video plays smoothly and it seems fine, but on older hardware there is a lot of lag and the browser slows down quite a lot.
Is there anyway to detect the performance of the video playback? I'd like to either replace the video with a static image or pause the video if performance is an issue.
Use the video metrics if available in your browser. Here's an example using webkit prefixed DroppedFrameCount.
http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium.git;a=blob;f=chrome/test/data/media/html/media_stat_perf.html
See also: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Video_Metrics for the Moz prefix.
You could use Get the timestamp of loaded page to determine how fast the user loads the page, then if their bandwidth is below a specified threshold, supply an image rather than the variable.
Related
I have a MP4 video of a product which shows a 360 of the product (so it looks like it's spinning) - I have it autoplaying on the page and looks great.
I want the user to be able to click and drag on the video to basically rewind or fastforward the video, so they can kind of scroll back and forth and spin the product around as they wish.
We have used the js-cloudimage-360-view library and used images, but because we wanted this as smooth as possible each colour had 360 images and loading times weren't great, we have MP4s which are small in size and load fast but it's just the srubbing I can't get right.
I'd had a look at this https://codepen.io/webandapp/pen/xEjjOJ too but it's supper jumpy, essentially we want if the user drags to the right it fast forwards as they drag, when they stop it should play from that point (and rewinds if dragging to the left) - this should be as smooth as possible.
The video is just a HTML video element like so:
<video id="three-sixty-video" preload="auto" controls loop playsinline autoplay muted>
<source src="/video/video-1.mp4" type="video/mp4;">
</video>
Scrubbing on a streamed video is limited by the speed at which the video can be downloaded, decoded and displayed.
For a large video on most devices and connections it is not practical/possible to do all this as quickly as a user can scroll along the video timeline.
This is why video containers (mp4 etc) often include a track of thumbnail images which are displayed when the user scrubs along the line.
In other words, it is not actually the video you see in the small image in the timeline, but the appropriate thumbnail for that time in the video.
When the user stop scrubbing, the player then requests that section of the video, decodes and displays it. This is (generally) not immediate.
If your video is small enough and is downloaded completely then you may find you can scrub as quickly as you want, but even then it may be device/client dependent - a quick local test with a number of videos seem to suggest it should scrub ok when available locally:
Using a relatively small 30MB, 50 second local mp4 video, available locally on he computer hard drive (a MAC), scrubbing is relatively smooth using the Quicktime client player.
The same video on the same device being viewed by the Safari browser rather than directly by the QuickTime client appears to be similar, although it is hard to be sure. The playback may well use very similar paths under the skin.
Using a much larger 2G, 4K, 2 minute 30 second video, also locally on the hard drive, scrubbing is again relatively smooth both in Safari and QuickTime.
As a side note, if you do decide the solution is to have the video fully downloaded before you play, that is also an interesting challenge. Most effort is usually focused on the opposite, allowing a video to start playing before it fully downloads. You may find that, providing the video is not too big, having the header info at the end (the MooV atom for mp4) will force the browser to download it fully. This is the opposite of the mp4 faststart you will see discussed some places. I'm not sure how reliable this will be as I think some browser may be clever enough to 'search' in the video by making different requests for bytes at the start and end to find the metadata.
I'm currently working on something that uses a livestream from Ustream as a fixed background. At the moment, it only works on desktop, and I personally think that it wouldn't be the best idea to do this for mobile because of performance and so on (not to mention, I would hate for my mobile data to be chowed down by a video I cannot control). I'm simply curious if it is possible at the moment.
I tried it, just for fun, but realized that it doesn't autoplay and if I do initiate it by hitting play, a media player opens up with the stream in it - at least on iOS.
Just got me wondering if this was possible. I mean, facebook and instagram do it without opening up a media player, so I'm sure it is, but I'm assuming it's not as straightforward as I would want it to be.
Curious to hear your thoughts!
It is possible, but I guess more likely it depends on the device and the browser what it using, I tried now with this url: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/ on my S9+ with the Samsung browser and it works for me if I ask the desktop version of the website. However I suggest to forget the background videos or the users will hate you when your app/site will consume all of their mobile data. And I don't want to mention the lower end devices. Those may not support or if support it will have a bad experience to view a background video.
For background video: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_fullscreen_video.asp
Normally a real stream doesn't have too much difference compared to a static video if we just strictly viewing the background video/stream part.
It is possible, there is a good article on it here.
As the article describes...
By default, it can only autoplay when the video is muted. But for
webkit/iOs you also need a second attribute; playsinline. This
attribute makes it so that it, well, plays inline (and doesn’t
automatically jump to fullscreen video)
More information from google and webkit
I am developing a time-lapse video player using HTML5 Video element and is controlled by mouse (touch) events. The problem is that the videos which will be played are encoded at a different frame rate, not fixed like common 24 FPS. In native platforms such as iOS, there is a native API which provides video's frame rate. I am wondering if is there any similar API on HTML5 Media API. Without this information, I cannot play a video smoothly on my player.
Mozzila Developer Network does not list any methods for finding the framerate of a media element. However, there is an experimental method called seekToNextFrame which could be used to advance frame by frame. This is only supported by firefox behind a flag.
So i'm trying to stream video in segments without using the MediaSource extension. (Because not all browsers support MSE). Now i'm trying to do this by loading two video elements and play the next one at the right moment. But this has a very tiny delay between switching. I tried to keep checking the currenTime of the video and after a tiny fraction play the next video element. But this doesn't really work that well (audio overlaps, or delay)
Mind you that the video are preloaded and loaded from Blob storage. So the loading shouldn't delay the playback.
How can i make this (Or another solution without flash) play smoothly without using MediaSource extensions?
Your best bet is to use two video elements positioned one on top of the other. The first one should be playing the current part (or chunk) of the video. The second video element should be loaded with the blob that contains the next chunk and be paused. It should also be hidden (you can set display:'none' or z-index:-99999). And then when the first video element ends (the end event is dispatched), call the play() method of the second video element, show it, and hide the first one. Rinse and repeat.
This is what the LifemirrorPlayer does.
If the chunks of the stream are perfectly encoded and cut then this technique works. Often it doesn't. Common problems are:
Synchronizing the audio stream is the probably the hardest. After twenty or thirty chunks are played, the audio usually loses sync with the video. This is very annoying for the viewer and hard to detect and fix (i don't know of any solution actually).
The video element doesn't end. This is usually caused by an encoder that has put too much (or too little) content into a chunk. It can also be caused by improperly cut chunks, by a buggy encoder or decoder.
Flickering when the two video elements are swapped. This depends on the browser. However most browsers deal very well with this and the swap is quick and smooth.
What's the best way to show an animation from after effects on a website onload?
It needs to play like a load screen in all major browsers and iOS devices.
What's the best way to show this?
I tried html5 and the auto play didn't work on iPad. I don't want to use flash. The animation is too complex for just JavaScript. Is it worth trying to make a high quality animated GIF?
Well, your main problem with virtually any onload video is going to be load and buffer time, especially on a mobile device. If the splash screen takes half a minute to load, the experience will be very subpar, and there's virtually nothing you can really do to reduce that load time short of making the video low quality (a large animated gif will have the same problem).
My recommendation would be to try coding the animation using pure HTML5 animation effects if possible. They will render faster, use only static images, javascript and CSS, and will be more widely compatible with modern desktop and mobile browsers.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to auto-play html5 video on an iOS device. At least as of iOS 5, Apple has disabled both auto-play and pre-loading, presumably to save bandwidth for users who may be on limited or expensive mobile data plans.
Unless you're willing to skip the video, the only workaround is to get the visitor to click or touch something on the page. Mobile Safari will allow you to play a video using Javascript methods (as opposed to the native player controls), but the first call to .play() has to come from a "click" or "touch" event handler.
You can limit this requirement to iPads and still allow desktop browsers to auto-play, but there doesn't appear to be any kind of reliable feature-detection method, so you have to parse the User Agent string (navigator.userAgent).
There isn't much documentation on the strange, non-standard things Mobile Safari does with video, but this article has some very good, detailed information and some code samples:
http://blog.millermedeiros.com/html5-video-issues-on-the-ipad-and-how-to-solve-them/
Edit: And then there's this elaborate and absurd workaround that Apple uses on its own site.
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1GWTMLjqQsQS45FWwqNG9ztQTdGF48hQYpjQHR_d1WsI