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.

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/ returns instead will help.

I really liked the effect, but took my headphones off to hear my MBP preparing for takeoff.

Bluekitten, you are hellbanned for no apparent reason as of 21 days 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.

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.

Are there many accounts like that on HN?

This person or group has created lots of accounts, but there are no others like them that we know of.

Why do people get hellbanned for?

mediacru.sh returns MP4 videos, though...

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-you...

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

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.

Did your cpu usage spike?

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!

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.

Same

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).

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

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

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).

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

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(); })

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

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

Agreed. I had to open the source and see what they were using. Native video elements...I like it. I figured it was a nice GIF or something.

Not sure what the others guy are talking about. Works fine on my MacBook Pro...not issues at all?

Same with Safari 7 on my MacBook Pro. Worked a treat, was a super cool concept. I'm surprised to see all the complaints with Chrome, I always took that browser to have the best support for this kind of stuff.

I'm using Chrome and it works just fine. I'm actually quite curious what's causing the negative experience across equally capable machines.

Me too! I'm using Chromum 31 and Chrome 32 on Linux with old open-source Radeon-HD drivers, and ran that page without issue. shrug

A different video card, codec chain, and on and on, can yield a very experience. Being an early adopter of many Harry Potter-esque moving pictures can yield nice content, but it will invariably cause client issues.

As I mentioned in another post, it works fine in Chrome 34 on the same hardware that it struggles dramatically with in Chrome 32. Both of them have hardware decoding enabled, and so on. The Chrome 32 instance has no problems at all playing video anywhere else.

Indeed, on that same line, the videos don't load at all on Chrome on the Nexus 5. The N5 of course supports h264, and has no problem on any other site that I've ever discovered. Maybe their server is now overloaded (EDIT: Okay they're using S3....going to be an ugly bandwidth bill from that...and it's fully responsive), but it also doesn't load on the iPad 3rd generation running iOS 7. Again just black boxes.

EDIT: I wonder if it's because they're (s3) setting the content type to octet-stream, rather than video/mp4. Some clients seem to be going on alternate decode paths or are refusing to display it because of that.

e.g.

Content-Length:6915107 Content-Range:bytes 0-6915106/6915107 Content-Type:application/octet-stream

There's a lesson in here somewhere.

In my experience Safari is generally much smoother and uses less power than Chrome on OSX. Chrome frequently makes my MBP uncomfortably hot on websites that Safari doesn't break a sweat on (like Flash videos on Youtube, although Chrome's built-in Flash could be causing problems). It's unfortunate.

Thank you for your comment: it allowed me to understand that the empy blocks I was seeing were meant to be videos (Firefox user here).

It's sad to find out that they ignored that mp4 isn't supported by all browsers. I know: HTML5 video is just a PITA, and that's indeed a reason why so many still rely on gifs.

I hope this project grows, and that they will care a bit more than they did here.

Works for me on Firefox 26.0 on Ubuntu?

Firefox only supports platform codecs for mp4. So, for instance, it doesn't work on XP.

Neither on OS X

> I like the use of short 2-5 second videos instead of pictures.

I utterly disliked it. It made my browser slow and so I didn't read their page.

Autoplay has been the devil for 15 years in UI. You don't repeat animation and you don't auto-start it unless that is the expected primary feature of the landing page.

I opened the page with Firefox and my (reasonably powerful) laptop started overheating instantly.

Opening the page via eww in EMACS made it readable since it doesn't load videos if I don't ask it to.

Possibly, although I'm not that keen on my CPU fans spinning up just to scroll through a web-page.

I wonder if that could be optimized if they were compressed GIFs.

Apparently [1] MP4s (at least their file sizes) can be optimized much more than animated GIFs, although it doesn't seem like that's been fully done here.

[1] http://gfycat.com/about

h264 videos are generally significantly smaller than comparable resolution animated GIFs, not to mention being much better quality: It is a very good thing that the era of animated GIFs is drawing to a close, and the pace with which MP4 is supplanting animated GIFs is quickly accelerating.

Having said that, an h264 source can have magnitudes more complexity for playback, and generally the greater the compression the higher the playback complexity. Having five or so high profile multi-MB decorative videos autoplaying on a page is excessive.

They shouldn't use autoplay. They shouldn't even initialize until scrolled into view. They shouldn't all play at once. Their bandwidth usage is going to be enormous from this HNing, a single page impression pushing 15MB+ (EDIT: I hadn't really delved into it at the time given the display issues, however I grossly underestimated when I said 15MB).

@simoncion you've been hellbanned in this thread for some reason.

Thanks for the heads-up. Not that I want to learn anything about HN's ban system, but it's interesting to see that the hellbanhammer can be wielded on a per-thread basis.

Oh, I was wondering what those were. They just appear as black boxes on my tablet. I guess they're flash?

MP4 using HTML5 <video> tags.

What's your tablet?

Nexus 7 (2013) -- running Android 4.4.

Different person, but the videos do not load in either the iPad (iOS7) or Nexus 7 (Android 4.4) for me. As mentioned in another post, the content-type being returned is wrong for video/mp4, at least from the S3 servers I am hitting. Perhaps this varies and is correct for some, but it seems to be the reason for so many varied experiences -- some clients just ignore it, others seem to choose render paths based upon it, and others refuse the content because of it.

I like the idea, but the moving images in my eye line as I tried to read made me feel really queasy.

So that's why I had a bunch of random gaps.

Poor degradation to those of us running NoScript, there.

If you run a browser extension that breaks the web, the web breaks. Maybe try something like DoNotTrackMe instead?

I actually really disliked this. Too distracting for me. Maybe my tastes will change over time - but I stopped reading because I couldn't concentrate on the text.

As someone who often browses over remote desktop, it gets quite frustrating, since all of the sudden my connection, which is fast enough for static text, freezes.

On a well-equipped i7 Windows 7 x64 machine, this web page brought Chrome 32 to an absolute crawl.

Worked so well that I didn't even realize this was video, thought they were GIFs

Worked well technically on i7/win7/laptop(32GB)/firefox. I didn't like the effect though: jittery, repetitive, distracting. A tripod would have gone a LONG way here as well as only using in focus images. as only using It was like channel surfing. I said, "ooh ahh" to myself, but didn't hold the channel there for long even though I love the concept.

Worked well for me on same hardware / software - suggest your video drivers aren't, er, driving...

FWIW it runs fine on Chrome Canary (currently 34). CPU/GPU is still excessive for videos that people might not even want to see, but the videos all run smoothly and the browser remains responsive. Not sure what the Chrome difference is for that.

I7, 32 GB ram, 7970 latest chrome dev and it was on its knees.

Works great on a i7 Ubuntu 13.10 x64 machine under Chrome 31.

i5 Mint 16 with Chrome 31 - worked great, no fan speed ups for anything.

Chrome Win7 as well. This page makes all 4 (and 8 hyperthreaded) cores peg 100%. But strangely it still feel responsive in scrolling etc.