Posts by madlep

If there are topics you are interested in that relate to how the website works, post them here, and the dev team will look at writing future articles on them.

We’re always happy to talk about how we do things

Most of the posts so far have been about what we think is interesting in our day to day work. A lot of other things we do we probably take for granted, but would be interesting to people outside of Envato.

Just spotted an issue where newly created users (since we turned on Single Sign On), can’t update their Marketplace profile information.

Fix to be deployed shortly for that.

Sorry for the problems caused by the upgrade, and the delay in getting them sorted out.

We’ve reverted the video player back to the old version now, so hopefully that will solve the new problems you’ve been seeing.

What we had done originally is upgrade from one version of the plugin to the next. In theory it should have been a smooth change, but various issues started popping up.

We spent some time investigating if it was possible to solve the issues people were seeing with the new player, but weren’t able to come up with a satisfactory fix to them. So we reverted the upgrade, and went back to the old version.

Here’s a quick technical summary of where we got to:

HTML5 vs Flash playback

The player we are using is capable of HTML5 playback (which is preferable). It will pick whether to use that or Flash based on the video being played, and the browser capabilities.

HOWEVER, all our video previews are in a format that can’t be played back via HTML (flv). So everything is played with Flash.

Blue Tint

This seems to be a problem playing back videos in Google Chrome using Flash. I’m not sure why this is a problem with the new player, but not the old (they both use Flash). Will make sure that we look out for that next time we do work on the player

Videos not playing

This was happening before the upgrade, and after (fixing this was the main reason for trying to upgrade). It doesn’t seem consistent, and we don’t have a good reason why it’s occurring – it will happen to some people, and not others, and on some videos, but not others. Our theory is that the player is bad at buffering correctly when playing videos that are too large, and/or bandwidth isn’t enough to play them at a constant rate.

Plus in addition to that, some of the video previews are just REALLY BIG. We’re serving videos up from Amazon S3, which is usually pretty good for bandwidth, but it does have it’s moments where it slows down.

We don’t do any processing on videos that are uploaded when items are submitted. If we were, then we could optimise them into different formats that are provided based on bandwidth, and playback device. This is something that we’re looking at.

If anyone has any further problems with the reverted player, please add comments to the thread.

We just deployed an update that changes UI skin for the new player so the time is shown better. Hopefully that should work a bit better.

We’re still looking into the blue tint issue.

Also, if you’re having trouble, try clearing your browser cache.

The old player is still running side by side, and it may be running instead.

I’ll have a look into some of these issues today.

If anyone is having problems with videos not playing, or stopping part way though, could you do the following for me:

- go to http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest

- under “What cloud services do you want to test?” check only “Cloud Storage”, then click on the “Select” link next to “Cloud Storage”. - Check only “Amazon S3’

- Click “Save”

- Under “What type of tests do you want to perform?”, select only “Download a few large files”

- Under “what service regions do you want to tests?”, select whichever region you are currently in

Run the test, then post results back here wrapped in an HTML pre tag. e.g:

Large File Download Tests
Service    Location    Time (secs)    # of Samples    Transferred (MB)    Min Mb/s    Max Mb/s    Std Dev    Median Mb/s    Avg Mb/s
Simple Storage Service (S3)    SG    11.04    1    0.48    0.35    0.35    0%    0.35    0.35
Simple Storage Service (S3)    JP    21.92    2    0.96    0.32    0.39    13.81%    0.39    0.35

I suspect the issues with videos not playing are due to bandwidth and/or the new player not buffering properly when bandwidth is low.

I’ll add bug tickets for the other issues people are seeing (blue tints etc), and get them looked at too.

flashato said

madlep said
Yup

We just pushed out an update to the video player. It’s an upgrade to the latest version of the software we were running previously.

Are you guys having problems with all videos, or just specific ones?

Post details here, and I’ll look into it.

Thanks madlep,It s nice to know we are not forgotten.
But IMHO it s time to have a brand new player, with new functionalities and compatible with the Apple devices.
I hope this is just the starting point,and that we do not have to wait another 3 years in order to have the next update
Peace,
Arthur

It’s something we’re looking at. This was a quick update to fix some problems that some users were having.

The problem with VH on Apple devices (that don’t do Flash) is most of the videos are encoded in FLV format, which isn’t very HTML5 friendly. The new version of the player is actually smart enough to use a mobile Safari friendly HTML5 player if possible, and fall back to flash if required.

Unfortunately, that’ll happen in VH till we change the video format.

Yup

We just pushed out an update to the video player. It’s an upgrade to the latest version of the software we were running previously.

Are you guys having problems with all videos, or just specific ones?

Post details here, and I’ll look into it.

digit1010 said
Numerous Live Previews are coming back with errors. I don’t know if it is just specific to this author:

Notice: Undefined variable: args in /nfs/c09/h01/mnt/131366/domains/madza-wordpress-premium-themes.com/html/wp-content/themes/growing_feature/admin/admin_metabox.php on line 760

Notice: get_theme_data is deprecated since version 3.4! Use wp_get_theme() instead. in /nfs/c09/h01/mnt/131366/domains/madza-wordpress-premium-themes.com/html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 2824

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /nfs/c09/h01/mnt/131366/domains/madza-wordpress-premium-themes.com/html/wp-content/themes/growing_feature/admin/admin_metabox.php:760) in /nfs/c09/h01/mnt/131366/domains/madza-wordpress-premium-themes.com/html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 876

That would be specific to individual items. We don’t host live previews on our marketplace servers at all. They’re hosted by authors themselves. We just link to them from the item pages.

Sometimes it’s tough being one of the token “guys with hair” on the team.