FAF Website Main Video

@speed2 said in FAF Website Main Video:

Having an auto playing video on the website doesnt sounds like a good idea

It won't make sound - just an animation sequence like BAR has:

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

You can't put a 5mb+ file as a background video on the main page...

"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice

@Brutus5000 can you explain why its a 5mb+ cap for the main page. whats the limitation ? the clip being use was ripped from the C&C website for testing and its 8.7Mb

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" - Spock

@rowey i think it should be light to load it faster

Yeah, you don't wanna have a mobile user suddenly see 500mb disappear from their packet.
Though it's entirely possible to get this video 2 min video to like 30-40MB. Though I still think this is gonna be too much.

the current clip was using is 20 seconds and is only 8.8mb wich to me doesn't seem that much of a streach

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" - Spock

can be used webp, or smt that is better. Or some other types of streaming content

You need to make sure it works on mobile. I’ve had videos like this cause all sorts of issues like completely freezing the page or crashing the browser or like others said just eating a ton of data. Don’t assume that you know what is “ok” for someone else’s data usage. Just because your mobile plan can handle it doesn’t mean that others can.

You also need to make sure that it scales properly on small screens and doesn’t make the whole website derp out. You can use CSS to load different resources depending on the screen size, so I’d recommend either loading a lower res version of the video or maybe not loading a video at all on mobile.

@jip said in FAF Website Main Video:

@speed2 said in FAF Website Main Video:

Having an auto playing video on the website doesnt sounds like a good idea

It won't make sound - just an animation sequence like BAR has:

It still has 7,5MB
So if you're browsing on a phone and eats that much data for news, in our case for a webpage. I'd rather have a simple image

Sounds good, for sure much better than an image from supcom 2.

Check out my maps here:

Madness 1 - 10

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/480/h-master-s-maps

Since it's a background video it can be scaled down and have reduced framerate. I remember back in the days people had contests how they could fit best looking videos into tiny gifs. No clue what can be reached today but I would aim for 2mb max on the main page.

"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice

For context, the existing image is already 2.3mb.

Well on a certain game we are using webm and manage to get 720p 30fps videos that are 1.30 minute long in a range of 10-30Mb depending on how much action there is in it. So honestly I can see 720p 30s video at 15fps doable in range of like 5Mb.

Actually might as well try seeing what will the trailer end up after moving it through ffmpeg with said settings in webm container.

@speed2 said in FAF Website Main Video:

@jip said in FAF Website Main Video:

@speed2 said in FAF Website Main Video:

Having an auto playing video on the website doesnt sounds like a good idea

It won't make sound - just an animation sequence like BAR has:

It still has 7,5MB
So if you're browsing on a phone and eats that much data for news, in our case for a webpage. I'd rather have a simple image

I get your concerns - we could detect the fact that you're on a phone and show a static image instead.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

First of all i think that pages that auto-play videos in the background suck in general, i would leave such a page as fast as possible. Kinda has this trashy "we are trying to be flashy at the cost of usability" vibe.

@swkoll said in FAF Website Main Video:

For context, the existing image is already 2.3mb.

And that is why i have used my ad-blocker to block that image, because the image used to load really slowly for me and blocked other parts of the page from working fast. If it is a full HD picture then it should be possible to get it to be under 700KB in size, if you use a good format like JPG at reasonable quality

As for video content, I generally think a better idea would be to embed a Youtube trailer in the page, so that people can decide if they want to pay the data cost. Then there is the simple fact that hosting a video yourself SUCKS. A Youtube video will be

  • encoded in the best way possible to be as small as possible
  • will auto-downscale the video so that multiple resolutions are available
  • will automatically select a good quality level depending on connection
  • allows people to easily share that video on social media if it is actually a good trailer

I can tell you right now that you will not be able to get it working well by coding stuff yourself. Just use Youtube, please.

@rowey The video should be no more than 3 to 8 MB. We will strip the audio track to save size.

The 20 second C&C video shows the kind of content we want. Action shots transitioning into other action shots. A typical trailer or existing video likely will not be suitable.

@RandomWheelchair Good point - we will use a static image for mobile devices.

Also I wasn't aware the current image was 2MB. We can optimise that too.

@Brutus5000 If you're worried about server bandwidth then it's yet another reason to use Cloudflare...

@Eternal MP4 is fine for streaming content like this. If we included webp we would need to provide an mp4 failback anyway.

@Katharsas Hosting a video of this size ourselves doesn't really suck.

  1. It will be cached by browsers.
  2. It is streamed not downloaded.

YouTube is out of the question for a background video.

You are also an edge case that blocks the existing background image. We cannot design a webpage for someone using an adblocker to block existing images.

What we can do is keep this file super small and make it so that it falls back to an image for mobile phone users. We can optimize the current fallback image somewhat too.

Former Board Member - March 2021 - March 2022

Anyway, 2 minute video is a little bit too much now that I'm trying to do anything with it.
The bar one is just 35s one mp4. that weights 7-8mb. Meanwhile I currently got something like 47Mb for this 2 minute trailer we have or 28mb but I think it's to much of quality drop already.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mnitiFntXdrgvLNtuBU7FGN9lk22pVHk/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nXHpkJYE8YEgR6VkZVnGOWidR6hvjFvj/view?usp=sharing

Both are 720p one is still buffering.

for the Video we were looking at ruffly 20-30 seconds as that a decent amount I fist thought off any more is a bit too long

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" - Spock

The C&C one was 8.7MB

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" - Spock