Hey GMC!

There's one thing I really don't like about the new player. When I open a video with the bigger player, the video loads and starts playing. But... the playing goes faster then the loading and then the player doesn't stop, but plays every quarter of a second which sounds very weird... I think it'd be better if the player just starts playing, and if it can't go on, just stops and buffers for a while in stead of stop, go, stop, go etc. etc....


Greetz!

Kaz

You need to let the video buff. These higher quality videos are MANY times larger than the original videos. You should hit pause and let the video buff. Depending on your internet connection it will take around ~1 min.

yeah but with 8MB connection, I can watch hi-res movies without buffering, so I guess its more of server bandwith problem..

I can't even watch the videos at all on my laptop. They should have put in an option of viewed the old format, that would not have been hard to do. Stuff like this should operate in a test mode for at least awhile, as an option. Standard software development principle.

edit: also keep in mind, the service provider at times has really slowed down, at least in service to the US. To about 20% speed or less. What will it be when that happens, and instead of waiting 2 or 3 minutes for a video, people are waiting 15 or 20 minutes?

I just think this is a bad idea, except as an option. It really adds nothing other than higher resolution, the rest is just pretty stuff that means nothing. Not worth the problems it is going to cause to have this as the only method of delivery.

This isn't your problem kaznie but i've got another problem with the new player so i suppose i should post it here. It is taking absolutely ages to load (10mins and 15secs for a 1:15min video), and i know this is because the files are larger but is there any way to make it quicker? Also i used to just pause the video and drag the slider to the beginning so i could just let it load fully before i watch it. Now when i drag the slider to the beginning it automatically starts playing again and i have to pause it again. It's not much of an inconvenience but it would be nice if it would stay paused.

the files are like 30mb. Whatever slowness in the past you have had, it will now be 5 or 6 times slower in such instances.

Yeh that can get quite annoying fairly quickly.

I will stop my BMW now, but Kris really needs to pull back on this, and bring it on as an option, where the user can select new format or old format.

Even in a marketing sense, he is going to lose potential new customers with this, rather than gain them.

I'm at work on a T3 line we're having some serious issues too. Looks like GMC needs to up their bandwidth

There's another thread on this going on in the GMC Lessons and Practicing area. I've been trying to say it's not just a buffering problem!!! I think the new player isn't acting right on all machines. There's more to this than just some settings and such. I agree there should be a option of using the old player since everybody seems to have been able to use that.

tommyboy



I'm hoping this is the case because then I won't think I'm going crazy!

tommyboy

Yeh that would be the best way.

The problem is not your internet speed but speed of GMC server provider, so old format wont help - the bandwidth of server is exceeded by members, loading up 6x size videos.. Thats just IMO ofc, but seems reasonable..

The old videos seem to load fine for me though.

Just wanted to add my name to the list of users having trouble with slow new vid format... :-(

I'm not going to let this one die so this is more a post to keep this topic active. This kind of thing drives me nuts.

Sorry, I know I'm a newbie around these parts but when your paying for something you expect it to work and at least expect the people in charge to recognize something isn't right.

tommyboy

I'm just not sure how it could be possible to have both players as option.
Ok,old player is smaller but file would still be the same,
the bigger file made for new player.
Or perhaps server's converter can make a copy and compress
it specially for old type of player,smaller one?
I really have no idea how these things work,just guessing.

Please bring back the old player, or at least have an option for it. The new one loads OK but the playback (and sound) is choppy. Also, I have a downloading limit, so I would prefer the smaller files.

Just thought I'd add myself to the list. I'm having problems with slow video loading and somewhat choppy playback when viewing lessons with the new player.

Thanks for all the feedback!

We want the new player and video format to work for as many as possible - if those of you who are having problems could answer the following it would be really helpful:

Do you notice any difference in "chopiness" between these two lessons?

1 Trond's Solo from "Spindles"

2 Dejan's Palm Mute Workout

The more objective and detailed description we get from you - the bigger our chances of improving this. Thanks!

Ok, so I've found some differences between the too.

Dejan's lesson: great audio condition, but the vid is choppy and the aspect ratio of the vid doesn't match the player's. But that's probably because of the vids that Dejan sent in. The only problem with the player itself is that when it buffers up completely, the little white dot (cursor) won't follow the track. If you drag it to the middle, the main vid starts again from the beginning.

Trond's lesson: took twice the time to load in, but personally I dont really have problems with that because I let the vid buffer up to the middle and if I start the vid then the rest will buffer up until the vid ends. That's about 45 seconds of extra waiting, although it's a bit annoying to do this with all the small videos.

Other have posted this issue: when they wait for the buffering they pause first, drag the cursor back but the vid starts again and so they have to press pause again. This only happened to me with Dejan's lesson, but as I said, in that lesson the whole cursor-system was wrong.

With Ivan's lesson I've experienced the same as with Trond's. However, that rockabilly lesson takes even more to load in for me (aprox.: 2 min until the buffer reaches half way, and that's when I start).

Hope this helps, Kris!

The new player looks great and much more professional, so I hope you can get these things sorted out soon to make the best website in the universe even better

Thanks a lot Berko for the detailed info! By the way (and this is in regards to Dejan's video being the wrong proportions) - what web browser do you use? And what version of flash (right lick and the video and choose about). Thanks!

We are especially interested in hearing what people who are having problems with choppiness-after-buffering are experiencing.

Kris is there any way of having an option like some youtube videos where you can play the high quality video or a lower quality video in the player. So still use big player but have a choice of video quality. I have a 20 Mbit connection so I have no problems running anything but this would be an instant solve for a lot of problems.

Also please can I leave a recommendation. I think you should have a space on the main page for important issues that stick there. So maybe have a link to this thread permanently as we don't want to lose members who don't participate in the forum and don't realise things are being done to resolve the issues. You've worked really hard on this site so just keeping people in the know is great to make sure they know they are important to the site even though their voice doesn't get heard on the forum. And when problem is solved and everybody agrees we can have resolved added to topic title

I hope this feedback is alright

Hi Kris,
My browser is Firefox 2.0.0.6 with Adobe Flash Player 9.
I experienced random "chopiness" (from 10 to 20 hiccups) for both the lessons after they were fully loaded and then played. The "chopiness" is mainly of very short duration, although with the "Spindles" lesson playback did actually freeze for a moment.
Hope this helps a little.

Cheers.

It did help - thanks!

Oops, I forgot to mention, I used the Explorer with an Adobe Flash 9. But I tested the vids on my Mac with the latest version of Mozilla (updated a week ago) and again with an Adobe 9. I've experienced exactly the same. If it's buffered, only Dejan's vid is choppy, although the sound is ok. Surely it takes time to buffer. Otherwise there's no "random choppiness" after it - it's all the way fluent and smooth

@ berko - upgrade flash and you will get rid of the size problem in Dejan's lesson (it will not solve buffering or chopiness though).

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/?promoid=DXLUJ

Hi Kris,

I tried both videos and they pretty much act the same. Dejan's palm mute loaded in about 5 seconds and Trond's loaded in 12 seconds.
For me both the video and the sound are skipping. It acting like when you fast fwd a cd with the sound going however it's playing in it's normal tempo.

I'm using the latest version of Flash Player 10.0...... and I running Firefox 3.0.4

Thanks for tackling this,
tommyboy

I realize what you are getting at, Trond has a much larger size file. It matters nothing regarding the choppiness. It does matter wrt having to wait for 5 minutes to load a large video, which Kris, is an annoying long time. Having long waits on videos slows you down learning a lesson. I like to review and move fast and furious, and this is not good. i am being objective there.

But to the immediate issue. I noticed that running either, CPU usage is very high on Foxfire, pushing towards 100%. And this continues even after the video is fully loaded, and has quit playing. I see little change in CPU usage after the video has completed. Then if I switch out of the page to the home page, CPU usage drops down to near the zero range for Foxfire. Evidently there are bugs in the programming. Sounds like the thing is busy even when it is doing nothing.

Big difference!!! Trond's video was one big chop For viewing it I should have put it on pause first, but Dejan's video just worked straight away, no pauses!!

Just saw that the lesson from Dejan even loaded faster then Trond's "Normal" lessons!

This surprises me. For me, there is no difference between playing either, both play horribly. CPU usage is very high on both, and continues even after the videos have completed (until I get out of the page).

Regarding slow loading, that is not a bug, that is due to the very high resolution of the video, and cannot be improved at Kris's end. The Trond file is just big. I just can't imagine that most people want to wait for that, given the choice of that or a lower resolution video. High resolution should be an option. There is no argument on that point.

But that is a second issue, the immediate one now are bugs in the programming that are keeping it using all the CPU time, even when it is doing nothing.

The one problem I'm not having which you seem to be is the time for the file to download. The files are loading plenty fast enough however, I suffering from all of the same video and sound problems you are. Personally I like the old layout of the old player better anyhow. Ironic that I joined the site because of the quality of the videos and how smooth they played. Only to have things changing but not for the better.

tommyboy

edit: The large file plays fine in WMV format. So this is a programming issue.

I'm sure the problems will be ironed out soon enough.

The programming bug, probably (although that stuff can be tricky, I have done a lot of Actionscript programming, it is a lot more tricky than programming in Java or anything like that).

But they won't iron out the fact we will have to wait 5 minutes to load a video (when the service provider is operating well). Which is really as big an issue if you read what people say here.

30mb (Trond size) is just too big a file for this. Except as an option. The smaller Dejan size is good enough.

edit: also keep in mind, you in Europe have not had the problems we in the States have had, regarding throughput speed. I believe you are much faster anyway, even in normal times (based on responses I read when we were having problems with that over the past few months). It has been decent recently, but that has been off and on, and I see no reason to believe that won't reoccur.

I have timed the large video several times, and these are good times. 5 minutes to download.

It takes my connection 15 seconds to download 30MB. Not so bad. For me Mwahahahaha. But bad for everybody with slower connections

US has much slower. We are much slower. The time for a packet to reach us from their servers in Holland is 4 to 5 times as long as say going to any service such as youtube here. Do a traceroute and look at your speeds. Right now ours are the best I have seen, and that is about 150ms. Generally it is slower, more like 250ms. Your speeds are probably like 40 or 50 ms at worst, probably even much faster than that.

It is not slower local access lines, mine is fast enough. it is the routing from the GMC service provider in Holland that causes this. I am talking about the fact that we are slower, even at the best of times, over what you have in Europe.

A dedicated USA Server would solve the problem but that would cost a fair bit.

Don't feel that way, I'm sure after the initial "real" world tests are done and with some tweaking. the new lessons will play as fast and smooth as in previous player...Than everyone gains from new resolution and format (16:9).It just takes a little time...

Please check out this topic : http://www.guitarmasterclass.net/guitar_fo...showtopic=21607

Here's my findings.

I have a fairly new Windows Vista computer and a 512MB broadband connection. I also did nothing else on the computer whilst loading and playing these videos.

Spindles: Took 10 minutes to load but had no problems playing.

Palm Mute: Took 2 minutes and 20 seconds to load, and was basically dine playing. It did seem to sort of click and pause for a millisecond a few times but i might have just imagined it or it could just be some clipping in the audio.

I also would like to suggest that when you move the player dot back to the start when it is paused it should stay paused so you don't have to click pause again.

Could I just ask something, when people say "chopiness", do you mean when the video gets to a bit it hasn't loaded, like where the old player would have put up its buffering sign, or do you mean something else?

Something else. Even after the full video has loaded it still plays choppy. The best way I can describe it is like if the video had say a 100 frames to play only 50 have loaded even though the whole video has buffered so it's not running smoothly. In fact you can see this by watching the little white dot move through the file as it's playing it looks like it's skipping ever so slightly.

tommyboy




Hope so but it's frustrating nun the less.

tommyboy



I just think that the implementation could be been handled much better. I understand the need for real world testing but new lessons should be produced in the old player until the new player is up and running. I'm concerned as are some others it may take quite some time to fix this and any new lesson will be unusable to us.

tommyboy

There is no need to worry. Increasing resolution and data rate by 6x and putting a new system to action will always produce some bugs. But this doesn't mean that the new player will be unusable. A bit of patience is all that takes, so the new player can be tested properly mate.

Time will tell. But try and put yourself in fkalich or my shoes. How frustraded would you be if all of a sudden you couldn't use any of the new lessons because someone deceided everyone should have higher resolution. This upgrade is only a upgrade if everyone can make use of it. I would have no problem with this if the site was totally free. However, I'm spending money here and now I'm not able to get my full money's worth. That,s why I proposed staying with the old player that works for EVERYONE until proper testing and implementation can be done for a new player. Seems only fair!

tommyboy

We haven't given up on you Tommy and Fkalich - but as Ivan says these things don't work as quickly as we would like them to... However, I hope to reurn with some news soon!

Never thought you were giving up! If you get the new player working on my system I'll be right on board. But, until then I see new lessons that I would like to try but the video is so hard to watch I can't. Keep plugging away and I'll try to be patient. Just disappointed because I think the lack of implementation planning and testing was handled incorrectly. Remember Kris, most upgrades are backwards compatible so as to not leave people behind. I'm not seeing that in this instance.

tommyboy