5 ms·

I'd rather I it didn't auto-play and let me choose whether I want a page to swamp my bandwidth and CPU. Even over an 8Mb/s ADSL connection on a quad core Xeon w

I'd rather I it didn't auto-play and let me choose whether I want a page to swamp my bandwidth and CPU. Even over an 8Mb/s ADSL connection on a quad core Xeon workstation with 12GB or RAM and fairly decent video card this page is one of the worst behaved I've encountered in a while. Sadly I won't be reading any of the content because even after five minutes it's killing my browser. To the spark.io blogging team, please don't assume unlimited wads of broadband. Let the reader decide whether they want to play your videos, and you know, I can only watch one video at a time on that page, so why start them all playing at once? This is no better etiquette than CNN or MSNBC or an adware farm where they start playing videos at you upon arrival. It's very rude.

pacmon 13y ago
I'd have to agree. It's not the bandwidth that was the issue though. All those videos loading and playing at once crushed my poor browser (Waterfox 24) until I was able to slowly pause them one by one. This does, however, work mostly smooth on my version of Chrome (32).
theon144 13y ago
Firefox 26 with a shit-ton of privacy-related plugins on a budget $350 desktop, no slow-down at all.
zsupalla 13y ago
Performance issues are resolved, now the site only plays the videos that are on-screen.
kmfrk 13y ago
Indeed; autoplay=true is stupid, but on the other hand, it's quite remarkable how it manage to bring my desktop PC to its knees. Maybe using whatever https://mediacru.sh/ https://mediacru.sh/ returns instead will help.
- Kliment 13y ago
  Bluekitten, you are hellbanned for no apparent reason as of 21 days ago.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    Why do people get hellbanned for?
  - ewoodrich 13y ago
    This is the second time she's been hellbanned too. For no real reason either time. I'm not sure what's going there.
    - pg 13y ago
      Bluekitten is just the 100th or so reincarnation of recoiledsnake, which is as far as we can tell a Microsoft astroturfing campaign. Lately their sockpuppets are often female, to give people the impression we're banning women when we ban them.
      - grinich 13y ago
        Are there many accounts like that on HN?
        pg 13y ago
        This person or group has created lots of accounts, but there are no others like them that we know of.
- RossM 13y ago
  I really liked the effect, but took my headphones off to hear my MBP preparing for takeoff.
- cbhl 13y ago
  mediacru.sh returns MP4 videos, though...
  - Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
    You can easily embed MediaCrush videos on your site. I'm one of the devs on MediaCrush, I can answer questions if need be. It brings in webm, mp4, and ogv, but we've fine tuned the encoding more than most people would think to, and we have the video player UI in place if don't want to autoplay. https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/10/31/Add-media-hosting-to-your-website.html https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/10/31/Add-media-hosting-to-you...
- bluekitten 13y ago
  It's funny how BeOS could handle playback of multiple videos extremely smoothly on a Celeron 400Mhz from year 1998, but modern browsers struggle with it. Of course, the complexity of the codecs has increased, but it's still kind of strange given the huge advances in hardware.
simoncion 13y ago
What browser are you using? I didn't have any issues at all with that page. I'm using version 7.2.0 (this is a very old driver) of the open-source Radeon X.Org driver on a four-way Phenom II system with 16GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 6950 with Chromium 31 and Chrome 32.
simfoo 13y ago
I'm on a university fiber network using my beefy workstation and this page is killing my Firefox
- seferphier 13y ago
  Same. it was insanely stressful for firefox. But this was a pretty good use of videos. if it could be more memory efficient..
lewispollard 13y ago
I'm on ADSL with a low-end Core i5, 4GB RAM and integrated graphics, and didn't notice any slowdown at all.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  I'm running Windows 8.1 on an i5 with Chrome and didn't notice any slowdown (nor fan speedup, or any of the usual issues sudden resource drains tend to cause) at all either. Looking at task manager shows Chrome is only using 13% of the CPU while I'm actively viewing that page. I'm sure YMMV depending upon OS, browser, underlying installed codecs handling the video (and their associated gpu acceleration or lack thereof), etc.
- xauronx 13y ago
  Same
- sixothree 13y ago
  Did your cpu usage spike?
  - sp332 13y ago
    I also have an i5, and my Firefox was only using about half of one CPU, but stuttering like crazy. The UI froze up constantly and would barely scroll. FF 29.0a1 (2014-01-16) on Win7. Edit: This is with crummy AMD FirePro 2270 graphics. Chrome 34.0.1789.0 canary was very smooth on the same box!
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Yeah, it doesn't seem to be memory- or CPU-limited. My browser hard-locks for half a minute, but most major usage stats don't move.
singold 13y ago
Windows XP SP3 - Chrome 31.0.1650.63 - Core 2 Duo - 2GB Ram and no problems. Now i'm thinking about upgrading and all that... :P
ricardobeat 13y ago
It wouldn't have the same effect without auto-play. This is essentially a smarter GIF. Looks like the CPU suffers from all the videos playing simultaneously, maybe pausing videos as soon as they go off-screen could solve that (while browsers don't get to optimize this).
mcgaffin 13y ago
This could be a useful chrome/firefox plugin. If you run this in your browser console, all that video will stop: $('video').each(function() { this.pause(); })

pacmon 13y ago

I'd have to agree. It's not the bandwidth that was the issue though. All those videos loading and playing at once crushed my poor browser (Waterfox 24) until I was able to slowly pause them one by one. This does, however, work mostly smooth on my version of Chrome (32).

theon144 13y ago

Firefox 26 with a shit-ton of privacy-related plugins on a budget $350 desktop, no slow-down at all.

zsupalla 13y ago

Performance issues are resolved, now the site only plays the videos that are on-screen.

kmfrk 13y ago

Indeed; autoplay=true is stupid, but on the other hand, it's quite remarkable how it manage to bring my desktop PC to its knees. Maybe using whatever https://mediacru.sh/ https://mediacru.sh/ returns instead will help.

Kliment 13y ago
Bluekitten, you are hellbanned for no apparent reason as of 21 days ago.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Why do people get hellbanned for?
- ewoodrich 13y ago
  This is the second time she's been hellbanned too. For no real reason either time. I'm not sure what's going there.
  - pg 13y ago
    Bluekitten is just the 100th or so reincarnation of recoiledsnake, which is as far as we can tell a Microsoft astroturfing campaign. Lately their sockpuppets are often female, to give people the impression we're banning women when we ban them.
    - grinich 13y ago
      Are there many accounts like that on HN?
      - pg 13y ago
        This person or group has created lots of accounts, but there are no others like them that we know of.
RossM 13y ago
I really liked the effect, but took my headphones off to hear my MBP preparing for takeoff.
cbhl 13y ago
mediacru.sh returns MP4 videos, though...
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  You can easily embed MediaCrush videos on your site. I'm one of the devs on MediaCrush, I can answer questions if need be. It brings in webm, mp4, and ogv, but we've fine tuned the encoding more than most people would think to, and we have the video player UI in place if don't want to autoplay. https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/10/31/Add-media-hosting-to-your-website.html https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/10/31/Add-media-hosting-to-you...
bluekitten 13y ago
It's funny how BeOS could handle playback of multiple videos extremely smoothly on a Celeron 400Mhz from year 1998, but modern browsers struggle with it. Of course, the complexity of the codecs has increased, but it's still kind of strange given the huge advances in hardware.

simoncion 13y ago

What browser are you using? I didn't have any issues at all with that page. I'm using version 7.2.0 (this is a very old driver) of the open-source Radeon X.Org driver on a four-way Phenom II system with 16GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 6950 with Chromium 31 and Chrome 32.

simfoo 13y ago

I'm on a university fiber network using my beefy workstation and this page is killing my Firefox

seferphier 13y ago
Same. it was insanely stressful for firefox. But this was a pretty good use of videos. if it could be more memory efficient..

lewispollard 13y ago

I'm on ADSL with a low-end Core i5, 4GB RAM and integrated graphics, and didn't notice any slowdown at all.

georgemcbay 13y ago
I'm running Windows 8.1 on an i5 with Chrome and didn't notice any slowdown (nor fan speedup, or any of the usual issues sudden resource drains tend to cause) at all either. Looking at task manager shows Chrome is only using 13% of the CPU while I'm actively viewing that page. I'm sure YMMV depending upon OS, browser, underlying installed codecs handling the video (and their associated gpu acceleration or lack thereof), etc.
xauronx 13y ago
Same
sixothree 13y ago
Did your cpu usage spike?
- sp332 13y ago
  I also have an i5, and my Firefox was only using about half of one CPU, but stuttering like crazy. The UI froze up constantly and would barely scroll. FF 29.0a1 (2014-01-16) on Win7. Edit: This is with crummy AMD FirePro 2270 graphics. Chrome 34.0.1789.0 canary was very smooth on the same box!
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Yeah, it doesn't seem to be memory- or CPU-limited. My browser hard-locks for half a minute, but most major usage stats don't move.

singold 13y ago

Windows XP SP3 - Chrome 31.0.1650.63 - Core 2 Duo - 2GB Ram and no problems. Now i'm thinking about upgrading and all that... :P

ricardobeat 13y ago

It wouldn't have the same effect without auto-play. This is essentially a smarter GIF. Looks like the CPU suffers from all the videos playing simultaneously, maybe pausing videos as soon as they go off-screen could solve that (while browsers don't get to optimize this).

mcgaffin 13y ago

This could be a useful chrome/firefox plugin. If you run this in your browser console, all that video will stop: $('video').each(function() { this.pause(); })