Hey UMD fam! So all week I've been working on getting our Videos section playing on iPads and other mobile devices. You used to have to use a desktop or laptop to see anything on the Videos pages. But about a third of you are on mobile, so I had to give it a try. Most of the bugs are cleared, but let me know if you see anything unusual. UMD is still converting all the free vids to h.264 mp4's, so some of the vids are still offline. It should be pretty much done sometime tomorrow. Note this only refers to the free videos and trailers that play on the browser, not paid downloads.

We're making two versions of every video for the player: low and high quality. Premium members will automatically see the better-quality version on the player (and can also download the original file), but even the low-quality joint is better than those old flash files.

I've also finally turned on a wider version of the site. It'll shrink down to the normal width before giving you scroll bars, tho. This is only a stepping stone to an actual responsive site that'll shrink down to phone size--that should be coming in about a month.

Thanks for the patience of those whose messages I still have to get to.

Peace,
Messmaster

Sounds great, MM! You're always working to make things better for us!

Will the wider format help (for desk-tops and laptops) with the posted pics getting cut off on the right side? Or is that something totally different?

Norman

When people link to images directly instead of uploading them to UMD, we have no control over their size, and they can run up against the width limit. We now go up to 1200 pixels wide, but if the pics are bigger than that, they'll still be cut off.

MM

Feel like a bug-troll™ saying this, but on the main Videos page where the video should play, I get the message, "Error loading player: No playable sources found"; and I just a get a black box where the video should go on all other video pages (like http://umd.net/videos/dream-come-true--pov or http://umd.net/profile/idtitle/mudbunny/section/videos/video/dream-come-true--pov ). Viewing the Page Source, I can get the URL to the video file and succesfully download it, so don't think it's a path problem. I am on an older computer where as a rule I have to convert mp4's to wmv's, so maybe that's it? All this on Firefox, btw.

Thx for all your efforts!

Hmm, the vids used to be Flash, but now they're the ubiquitous mp4 format so they should play most places. If your computer for some reason can't handle mp4's directly, then that's likely why your browser can't play it either. I don't know how it could handle Flash but not straight mp4's?

Can I also suggest clearing your cache, as we have a new javascript player file and your computer could be still using the old one.

MM

OK, I cleared my cache and tried again with a hard refresh, but still get the same problem. Never had any problems playing videos here before though -- were they all flv's before this change or were some of them mp4's? (thought I remembered some being mp4's)

Guess we'll see if anyone else has this issue. But if it's just little ol' me, don't sweat it. I can still get the vids

EDIT: I'm a numbskull -- about the mp4's on my computer thing, my computer always could handle them, but only with RealPlayer which I HATE. So I always convert them to wmv's. Sorry about that confusion.

Yes, completely .flv before. I think any old thing could play those as long as Flash was installed. Now it's .mp4 and they are more demanding on computers. But honestly I'm still not 100% sure the prob is on your end, so let me keep an eye on it and listen to what others have to say and we can hopefully get it sorted.

Thx again -- and note my EDIT above.

What about VLC, dogg?

Thx, dogg That does do the ticket for playing mp4's on my computer The UMD Video Page still has the same problems for me though (was hoping the VLC installation would intercourse and comingle with my Firefox somehow ). But otherwise, very helpful!

Thank you for sorting this MM,it works a treat,and at last I can preview videos off my android phone,which is brilliant.....thanks again,really appreciated.