Videoplayer performance issue

Hello dear Boonex team!

I hope that my post will not be ignored because I am so tired trying to find some help about the problem described below.

Our company uses Boonex for internal corporate video-sharing system but we can’t deploy it into production state because of the problem with video player performance. All videos uploaded to Boonex shows extremely worth when looking at IE7 or 8 (even 9b) and looks just perfect when playing in FireFox. It is hard to explain but I will try. One thing I ask you before I start my explanation is to be very very patient and carefully.

1.       This is the special test page with uploaded sample - http://www.tube.av.ru/m/videos/view/Test. You have to open it in IE7 or 8 and compare quality of the video with the same sample opened with FireFox. Open two browsers and start playing same video simultaneously and you will see what I am talking about. In case you can’t see any even little difference I did some video with record of my browsers during play where you can see that right video (FireFox) plays smooth and nice but left video (IE8) plays with stuck each couple of seconds – here is the sample http://78.107.17.153/video/sample.wmv.

2.       I have checked this trouble on 25 pc in our company and got the same results with better or worthier results depending on CPU and memory of pc but summary result was the same – video in IE sucks! I have asked for many users in our company to test this video on their notebooks and workstations and got the same result – IE = extremely bad! FireFox = very good!

3.       Then I have to prove that there is no IE problem and the only problem is in the Boonex player. How can I prove that? Very simple! I did little web-page with Longtail player that plays exactly the same video file from the same server in IE7 or 8 absolutely perfect! Here is the link to the page - http://78.107.17.153/video/sample.html. It plays video absolutely the same quality as FireFox plays it. No difference.

4.       I asked for help mr. Rays from unity. As I understand mr. Rays is one of the developers of Boonex player. Finally mr. Rays said that he can’t see any difference in quality of playing and he can’t help me. Our developers also tried to find some errors in code and found some strange settings there but they can’t compile it with any reason. FL CS5 compilation (no changes in src files) process is succeeded but player is not working.

Please, somebody, help me. I can’t start production of boonex without quality video.

Thank you very much!

look into switching your player. flowplayer has been successful with many.

With plesure, but how? There is no documentation of how to switch it...

I myself would be interested to find something on this or someone who knows how this is done also.

Dito, I want to try something new

flowplayer. How?

People have integrated other video players in the past. I'd recommend you hire a developer who would know something about integrating video players if you want this done.

Maybe it is easier to fix player? ))) Or i am only one who worried about this ussue?

I agree with you, the video player really has gotten worse over the years. I have never gotten my player to look right, nor will is allow my You-Tube codes, no matter how i try them. I got to say this is such a disappointment to a lot of people. Rayz should help others more with his software, instead of saying up this and up that and it will work. Guess what, it still looks like crap. I run a Paranormal website so the need for real clear videos is a MUST. Now Rayz has video embedded that work well if you purchase it. Well what about the software's code to in-bed? Why not save us some money and just fix what you provide?

Thinking about socialengine.net ((

I totally agree with you guys. I never did like the whole Ray flash apps thing. I especially hate the flash admin part.  I wish boonex would really consider scrapping it and come up with something that is much more flexible. Or at least remove the video and music modules from Ray, and rebuild build those modules with  Something based off the JW player which is a great player and offers greater flexibility. It also has lots of  free  plugins and skins from which to choose from.

The main 'road block' to replacing the ray video player is the video duration.

The ray player sets the duration in the database if it sees a videos duration as being 00:00:00.

As is, if you just replace the player and not update the duration some other way (like when it is encoded!) your videos will show as being 00:00 and this may make members think the video is broken.

Are you sure about it? JWplayer supports "duration" tags in playlist... so you can update it with regex from DB...

<media:content url="http://blablabla/bla.mp4" duration="24:54" />

The issue is NOT with JW Player *using* a duration.

The problem is when you upload a video, the duration is not set during the encoding process.

The video page does pass the duration to the Ray player.

If the duration == 00:00:00 the Ray Player figures out how long the video is then POSTs it to a URL that trigers a DB update.

 I am sorry, i am not a developer at all, but this method sounds very dificult. Why player used to update DB? )))) Why not to use some little script that scans /files and updates duration information?

Nevermind... this does not help to solve the main trouble.