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Viddler isn’t great

Thursday, 15 February 2007 technology video

I’ve been linked to several video’s recently where it’s been hosted on Viddler. I’d just like to say now that I’m all in favour of people supporting new video services but they shouldn’t expect everybody to get the same service from the small start-up

I recorded a Viddler video trying to play:

It’s quite clear to me that they need to completely rework their buffering code so it works like other FLV players.

  1. Start downloading into memory (buffering)
  2. Measure the speed the download is coming in at
  3. Determine when you have enough video to play without having to buffer again plus some leeway for inconsistent download rates
  4. Start playing
  5. Keep the memory copy until the player is unloaded

The current system seems to work more like some uses of Windows Media video files. Some will let you skip but as soon as you do, the player just forgets everything.

Moreover the current system plays too soon and also takes an age to do so… If you look in the browser’s status bar, you can see “downloading data from www.viddler.com”

You’re using your main server to serve the videos as well?! No wonder the damn thing is crawling along here!

If you’re going to be successful in the online video market, you NEED massive bandwidth and even more servers to cope with the load otherwise as soon as you get popular, people will drop you faster than you can say “YouTube is a lot faster”.

No offence meant, guys… I’m just telling it like it is.