Online video

I’ve been watching Lost on ABC.com and PBS Frontline’s documentary Bush’s War on pbs.org recently with mixed results. I’ll write about the videos themselves later, but I wanted to write a bit about the video-watching experience.

First, the good things. The fact that these are available online for free without registration is a great step forward. The ABC videos have ads, but they’re not annoying (though none of them were interesting to me, either). ABC’s video quality was really good, and although it didn’t adjust to bandwidth conditions perfectly, it did it well enough. PBS mixed the video with links to full interviews and other related resources, which I found useful a few times.

OK, now some annoyances…
- PBS let me full-screen the video, which is great. If you switch to another window, it leaves full screen, which is usually fine, but since I have two monitors, I’d like to be able to watch video in one monitor and do things in the other one. YouTube has the same annoyance.. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were an effect of the flash player, but still, it’s annoying.
- ABC.com told me they didn’t support my browser… in fact they don’t support any browsers in linux. I figured this was probably just bad browser detection code, so I installed the User Agent Switcher and told the browser to pretend that it was IE 7 on Windows Vista. This fooled the javascript, but then Flash wouldn’t be tricked so easily and blocked me from viewing. So, linux was out, and I switched to OSX.
- I got it working in OSX, but it doesn’t seem to actually allow me to fill the screen with the video. The video is almost full-screen, but window decorations, menus, etc are still visible. This is annoying.
- The most annoying and perhaps most subtle thing is the pause functionality. When you pause the movie, it switches from the video to an ad, which is fine by me, however, the “continue” button is on the other side of the screen! This is really annoying, because if you pause accidentally or briefly, you can’t quickly click again to resume. I know it sounds minor, but after watching a lot of video on there, it’s very obvious and bothersome.

Ok, that’s enough griping for now.. time for sleep. More posting coming soon.