Open Pandora Videos

[banjeed]

I thought I'd share a site I've been working on for myself with the community. I frequently revisit videos related to the Pandora and thought it'd be nice to have a site I could go to to watch my favorites. If you'd like, check out http://mikekeon.com/pandoravids.html .

For the trigger-happy lot, I TOTALLY understand that there is already a video vault someone created which contains many of the videos related to the Pandora, but to be honest, I wasn't thrilled with it. I really just wanted a simple site I could scroll within to watch the videos. Very much in the spirit of the Pandora itself, if you want something, sometimes you just have to make it yourself. It's just an elegant interface with no bells or whistles. At this point, I absolutely understand that not ALL of the videos are posted at this time. I did a forum search for youtube and made it about halfway through before I decided to break for a while. I believe all current videos are posted, but please let me know if you'd like to see more up there. I plan to keep on top of new posts, but we'll see how my work-life goes for a while. Give it a whirl...you might notice something you haven't seen before.

 

[Alpha2]

those videos are ENORMOUS, hard for my computer to play because of the size.

 

[banjeed]

HAHA!!! I don't know if I'd consider 800x600 "enormous", but sorry to hear it didn't work out for you. What are your machine's specs / monitor size/Resolution?

Do many of you still run 1024x768?

 

[gruso]

For the trigger-happy lot, I TOTALLY understand that there is already a video vault someone created which contains many of the videos related to the Pandora, but to be honest, I wasn't thrilled with it.

Well, you certainly defused the first thing I was going to write. :lol: I'm not sure what you don't like about the existing Video Vault, but that doesn't matter really. You've got your reasons, and instead of bitching you set about building an alternative, which is cool.

The first thing that hit me on your site was the video size. I surf in a small window at work, so the Video Vault is more suitable for me during the day. Your site is very nice though, smooth and minimal. I'll bookmark it at home, and probably link it in the blog.

 

[banjeed]

For the trigger-happy lot, I TOTALLY understand that there is already a video vault someone created which contains many of the videos related to the Pandora, but to be honest, I wasn't thrilled with it.

Well, you certainly defused the first thing I was going to write. :lol: I'm not sure what you don't like about the existing Video Vault, but that doesn't matter really. You've got your reasons, and instead of bitching you set about building an alternative, which is cool.

The first thing that hit me on your site was the video size. I surf in a small window at work, so the Video Vault is more suitable for me during the day. Your site is very nice though, smooth and minimal. I'll bookmark it at home, and probably link it in the blog.

Much thanks for understanding Gruso, and for the record, I don't want to dog the video vault. I'm impressed with the Video Vault's category layout, but I was personally looking for a much lazier navigation scheme. I believe the video vault is great for those trying to find "that one video" (which is probably most of the community). I'm interested in pretty much every video related to the Pandora and prefer to lean back in my chair, with only a hand on the mouse, the other holding a beer, and giggle in my dream-like state as the drool hits my shirt.

 

[PSyMastR]

May I make a suggestion? Resize the videos to about 1/2 the size. The actual resolution of the video doesn't change when you make it so big, so flash has to resize it which will make it lag on anything short of a core 2 at 2.0 ghz.

 

[banjeed]

May I make a suggestion? Resize the videos to about 1/2 the size. The actual resolution of the video doesn't change when you make it so big, so flash has to resize it which will make it lag on anything short of a core 2 at 2.0 ghz.

Suggestion noted. I'll consider it in my next addition. As stated, this was a personal site, and it seems to run fine on all of my machines. I suppose if there's enough interest, I could revise it for the community and role with the ol' ctrl+scroll to get the videos to the size I like 'em when I'm viewing. Thanks for the tip.

 

[clippa]

I Love the understated design. Lots of video's there I haven't seen. It would be nice if the title text above the video was a link to the youtube page so you had the choice of opening the video in a new page before playing it. I find that when people embed videos, I'll start one playing, realise that I don't want to watch the rest of it, and when you click to play the next video, the other video is still loading and everything gets chuggy.
One big problem though, after all the previews of the videos have loaded, it really starts to bum the gob off my processor, it's eating around 60% of my downstairs computers dual core 2.4ghz and when a video plays, it keeps pausing. I'm guessing it's the amount of previews, or at least scaled up previews that's messing with everything but I'm guessing you cheked it all and it's working fine on your rig. Firefox and internet explorer are both brought to their knees for me.

 

[Alpha2]

Yeah, its not the fastest (it's old but I'm still installing apps on my newer laptop so it has to do for now.) but, I'm running a P4 mobile 2ghz, 1024x768 32bit color and it's a bad flipbook for me in firefox.

I agree I think it has to do with the enlarged flash videos and possibly the number of videos all on one page, since the computer still tries to load the thumbnail images for all the videos on the page so maybe also consider splitting them up between a couple of other pages.

 

[banjeed]

I Love the understated design. Lots of video's there I haven't seen. It would be nice if the title text above the video was a link to the youtube page so you had the choice of opening the video in a new page before playing it. I find that when people embed videos, I'll start one playing, realise that I don't want to watch the rest of it, and when you click to play the next video, the other video is still loading and everything gets chuggy.
One big problem though, after all the previews of the videos have loaded, it really starts to bum the gob off my processor, it's eating around 60% of my downstairs computers dual core 2.4ghz and when a video plays, it keeps pausing. I'm guessing it's the amount of previews, or at least scaled up previews that's messing with everything but I'm guessing you cheked it all and it's working fine on your rig. Firefox and internet explorer are both brought to their knees for me.

I think that's a good suggestion. Well it turns out that a few of my friends saw the post and plan on using the site, and are also suggesting I address the video size issue. I'm beat now, but I'll plan on making all of the video windows 425x344 next rev. I have to rework the shadows a bit to make it work. Thanks for the input everyone, I'm off to bed

 

[gruso]

Nice one. Next time there's a new video to report on the blog, I'll include a reminder about the existing video site and also mention that there's a new one.

 

[fischju2000]

As soon as I opened that in Firefox, it started using 50% of my CPU (a core) and went up to 500k RAM - but the videos are nice

 

[PoisonedV]

May I make a suggestion? Resize the videos to about 1/2 the size. The actual resolution of the video doesn't change when you make it so big, so flash has to resize it which will make it lag on anything short of a core 2 at 2.0 ghz.

i have multiple 2.7 ghz cores but youtube videos still lag like a bitch for me, even at low resolution and with everything closed. funnily enough, i can do large scale decrypting and other intensive tasks with no lag

 

[yaKC]

I'm running on my internet machine, slow 1.3 Gig, 512 MB RAM, didn't even get to play a video, it maxed CPU out whilst loading in just the previews, and then crashed firefox Think too many videos and too big size.

 

[arrrgh]

It started lagging the second I clicked on the link. The videos need to be much, much smaller and there need to be a lot less of them on one page.

 

[Esn]

HAHA!!! I don't know if I'd consider 800x600 "enormous", but sorry to hear it didn't work out for you. What are your machine's specs / monitor size/Resolution?

Do many of you still run 1024x768?

800x600, actually. h34r:

I don't really like big resolutions, though some websites force me to temporarily switch to a bigger one.

 

[valhalla]

HAHA!!! I don't know if I'd consider 800x600 "enormous", but sorry to hear it didn't work out for you. What are your machine's specs / monitor size/Resolution?

Do many of you still run 1024x768?

I do, except when I'm on my EEE at 800x480

old monitor that I got for free, and little willingness to go shopping for a new one

 

[gruso]

800x600, actually. h34r:

Wow.

 

[gene_kultpower]

For the trigger-happy lot, I TOTALLY understand that there is already a video vault someone created which contains many of the videos related to the Pandora, but to be honest, I wasn't thrilled with it. I really just wanted a simple site I could scroll within to watch the videos.

Did you notice that you can configure the Pandora Video Vault Website to show any number of videos on one page?
And you can even configure the site to show static preview images to prevent performance/memory overkill in your browser - or you can show the videos "as they are" to klick on one to show it immediately...

:rolleyes:

 

[gruso]

^ I didn't know about the preview image setting, that's a good feature.

Don't sweat it though man, everyone has different tastes and there's no harm in having another site with the same content. There is plenty of blog duplication too (across various languages) and the duplication comes in handy when the other guys pick up something we haven't seen yet.