I guess I am, de facto, a tester...

Comments from my other post:

I've already enrolled for 2 years and PayPal billed me for $8 less than the price you indicate in the About Us segment of the site.  I also had some issues with the first video I played back; I'm temporarily using a fairly slow internet connection and the videos pause every few seconds for a bit more video to download.  Under these circumstances it would be better if the entire video could be downloaded and then played.  I also noticed that it uses the Adobe Flash Player and it took me a while and some floundering around before I discovered a way to pause the video.  I still know of no way to back up nor can I seem to get it to play full screen.  Growing pains no doubt but I can already tell my money has been well spent.

Possible issue

Sorry

Yes, I should have put my comment in this thread.  Only had slight spooling issues on one video, but the scrolling down to the video player when you click on a video seems counter-intuitive.

Thanks, guys

The main URL trainmasters.tv isn't live yet so if you go there you will get just a static page. We're still in beta testing mode, so you have to use the backdoor URL:

dev.trainmasters.tv

As for the other feedback we've received, we've made a couple changes to the site that should make things better, namely:

1. Made the slide show only visible on the home page - it's gone on all the other pages, which dramatically reduces the scrolling on those pages.

2. Moved the sign up (non members) / play video (members) button to just under the video image on each video's description page.

These two changes should make it so minimal scrolling is needed to play a video.

Thanks for the feedback - you're helping make the TrainMasters TV site the best it can be!

Dev hyperlink

Hi Joe- Looks like the back door hyperlink in your post is wrong. There' s an "f" on the end of .tv

Thanks, Bill - I fixed the typo - much better now.  --Joe

Looks much better

Thanks, Joe, that looks much better.  Now, I can't wait to watch the whole video, not just previews!

Log in problem

Update

Bill, page caching issue

Bill:

What you're describing is a page caching issue. For the time being, we have turned page caching off on the server - see if that helps.

Page caching is intended to speed up the site by just serving an already built page without rebuilding it fresh every time. But it can sometimes cause you to still look logged in even if you aren't. Caching is tricky and you need to get all the settings just right for it to not cause page ghosting like this.

We'll research the issue and play with cache settings to remove any logout page ghosting.

Let us know how it goes for you with server page caching temporarily turned off.

Yep

need fast connection AND computer

Speakeasy shows about 13M download speed (from LA), but the audio doesn't look quite synced with the video - out just enough to look slightly curious.  This on my full-size laptop.  On the notebook, admittedly not a fast machine, but not that old, audio and video don't appear synced at all, and the video is very jerky.  Not something I would watch, despite having paid for a year.  I'm confident that it will improve, though.

David

Autoplay

Not sure how anyone else feels about this (minor thing), but when I click on the button that says "Play Video", I would expect that it would play and I don't have to click again on the play button in the video player.

Paul, you got it

Paul:

Immediate playback is a great suggestion - it now does that.

Keep the ideas coming guys, good feedback so far.

Auto Play

I agree with this, it should just play.

Also, I think clicking outside of the player should not just close it. Perhaps pause, but not close.

Okay, autoplay enabled

Okay, you wanted the videos to autoplay, and they do that!

As for the click outside the player window closing it, that's pretty typical behavior for a lightbox popup window. To make it not do that is a non-standard configuration. I hesitate to go with a non-standard configuration because that's not what most people familiar with lightbox popups will expect.

From a discussion on how lightbox popup dialog behavior should work, the question was asked "Should clicking outside a lightbox modal dialog popup also close it?" Here's the answer:

While we can make the video lightbox NOT close when you click outside the video player, I think it's just asking for support emails from people who can't figure out how to close the player.

Closing on click outside the player

My concern with this is that if you leave the page to attend to something else, like email perhaps, and you click on the page to bring the focus back to it, it closes.

Since there is no resume option, and you cannot start in the middle of the video, unless it has buffered that far already, it will be very frustrating to the user.

It is more standard behavior for video to not be in a lightbox but rather to play where it is with the option of full screen or, in some cases, a pop-out lightbox.

Example: Discovery's TestTube site: http://testtube.com/dnewsextras/dnews-8-tapped

And netflix for example, does not play video in a lightbox. Their video plays on a dedicated page and does not pause or quit unless you specifically click pause or close.

Not everyone is going to "watch" an entire video. They might jump between tasks and keep listening, or they might only listen until something pulls them back to it... an poof! it's closed?

Use of lightbox

Just to re-word, using a lightbox for video, seems to be a non-standard use of the lightbox feature, especially for longer videos.

Speaking as a professional web developer, Lightbox is appropriate for photos and video clips, where a quick exit is expected.

When a user has invested time in a video and it suddenly closes, and they don't know why, and there is no easy way to get back to where they were, frustration levels will be high.

Speaking as a professional

I will agree with Bill in that the videos can be long and as a result, someone may close it unexpectedly.  As long you provide a clear means to close the window (which you do), it should not be an issue if you disabled it.

By the way, you still have the Drupal favicon showing up.  You might want to change that to the MRH favicon.

This n that

Yes, the favicon is still the drupal icon ... replacing it is on the list.

As for the lightbox behavior, let me think about changing it. 

Regarding the video playback remembering where you left off - it doesn't do that right now, but it's on the list of enhancements to be made to the site later once it gets rolling good.

Sounds great Joe!

Thanks for all the hard work. Good luck with the Roll Out!

I have to admit, I'm pretty

I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about this new feature!  Great job, MRH!  

Lightbox and Firefox/No-Squint magnification

Is the lightbox causing the issues I saw when displaying pages magnified to 150% using Firefox and No-Squint?  Not all of the video box gets displayed under those conditions which clips the top/bottom/sides enough to prevent the video controls from displaying.

Haven't tried it yet ...

  But as a multiple monitor user on my desktop PC, I would find it very annoying if the video did not keep playing while I was messing with stuff on another screen.  Think PIP, not movie theater.  As a subscriber to a video service, I would expect to be able to fast forward, rewind, pause, and watch a video as many times as it is available on the site.  Now if it was spelled out that there were a limited number of viewings per month per user, I might expect different behavior.

  Guess I'll have to check it out ...

Toni

Didn't close clicking in other monitior with my dual monitors

Running Windows 8 desktop mode on a laptop with a 20" hp monitor thru HDMI connection using Google crome.