Talacre updated

The vids are great, however:

I couldn't view the Llandudno Jct at night vid. It gave me a white screen. (if it had been a black screen I'd have thought 'good joke'!)

The cab ride video took less than twenty seconds to download while your site gives a warning of 30 minutes for that file! Might be better to put the file size rather than a timespan that might put a lot of people off having a look.

The other point I thought with that particular file is if you're worried about it being a large file size why do two loops of the railway? Cut it down to once around the garden and you'll half the size of the file?

like I say though, great clips :)

Pete

mutley said the following on 12/08/2005 14:57:

How the bl**dy hell did you get a 49.2Mb file down in 20 seconds??? The average home user isn't going to get that speed...on a 2Mb ADSL it was estimated to take around 5 or 6 minutes at a good clip. I would suggest making the video smaller, such as only one lap around. I haven't actually seen any video yet because of the download time - I "only" have

The other thing is that the "following clips before dismantling" aren't hyperlinked to anything!

Dunno! I assumed it was buffering it and playing it while downloading?

So what I meant was it started playing after less than twenty seconds, and then played to the end with no hesitation. So I guess the total download time was however long the length of the movie is? Having said that, I only watched it do one circuit, had a dodgy bloke in the shop that I had to go watch instead...

Pete

I am no techie, but this video was playing on my PC within a few seconds of my clicking on the link. First off, it started playing when the download was only about 5% done, and then carried on playing at just about the same speed as the download, never quite overtaking it. I've not seen this before, usually a file has to completely download before it starts playing. However this has been achieved, it's quite nifty.

Secondly, I think it all depends on the time of day. My ADSL is a 2mb contract, but runs at 8mb "when available". Sometimes I can only get a 1mb connection.

I've noticed that sometimes I can connect on instantly, at other times it takes quite a few seconds, on other occasions it "times out" and I have to keep retrying.

As I said, I think it is all down to demand loads. When the bombs went off in London, like everyone else I know, I started streaming the BBC news on my PC. I used up a month's contract bandwidth in one day!

Anyway, back to the Talacre video itself. Luvverly stuff. I especially liked the way the Hand of God moved the carriages of the adjoining train out of the way as we entered the terminus! Oh, and I liked the second journey from the passenger's eye view, with the other passenger leaning out of the window!

I love Talacre, and hope we'll be seeing some more of this.

Cheers, Steve

before the download

On 12/08/2005 15:30, mutley wrote,

Ah - that's different! Now I'm back home, it all works fine. I guess work computers aren't designed for multimedia :-( Yes, the 30 minute bit is misleading, implying you have to wait 30 minutes before anything happens. Impressive layout, but who left the washing out????

As an aside, my earlier report that the other video links don't go anywhere is because the website isn't Firefox compatible, due to being written with Microsoft FrontPage. Under IE, the video windows appear above the text, but in Firefox there appears to be just a plain box, with no clue that there is anything missing. There have been nearly 80 million Firefox downloads over the last 10 months or so, which is a significant percentage of users that won't be able to use the site - 31% in Germany, 10% in the USA, dunno what % in the UK! My own website was written in MS FrontPage, but so many people said they could only see it properly using MS Internet Explorer that I re-wrote it to comply with standard HTML 4.

The message from "Mike" contains these words:

Most enjoyable cabride! I wonder if I could do the same with my N-gauge layout - Copenhagen Fields (IIRC) managed it...

Just out of interest, are you planning a model of the NMT? ;-)

Can I ask please, When you say the website is not Firefox compatable do you mean the whole site or just the Videos? or should I just write a link to the clips and not have Windows media player ??

Thanks

On 12/08/2005 20:06, Mike wrote,

The site is generally compatible, but when you click the "Video clips" link you don't get the strange speckly transition that you do with IE. I see you have already changed the videos to links, and that works fine, allowing the user to view the video in whichever package they prefer, and allowing any browser to work with it. Ironically, I prefer Media Player, but in it's own window, not embedded in a web page.

I've had a bumble around the site, and everything seems to be OK - at least nothing looks odd. When you compare some pages in IE and Firefox, there are some minor differences, but if you weren't doing the comparison, you wouldn't notice that anything was different. Did that make sense? Even the slideshow works OK!

I would like to see a trackplan of the new Talacre, and I wish a had a garden that size. In fact, I wish I had a garden!