Calling all dial-up users ...

[Darth Wong]

Just for fun, I replaced the image of the Death Star on one of the main site pages with a Flash movie of Alderaan being blown up.

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... eraan.html

Question: what does this do to dial-up users? Is it unreasonably punishing? Should I go back to the old static picture, or cut down on the size of this movie?

[Ritterin Sophia]

Question: what does this do to dial-up users? Is it unreasonably punishing? Should I go back to the old static picture, or cut down on the size of this movie?

How can you unreasonably punish Dial-Up Users for having dial-up?

[Bounty]

The image doesn't load for me. I can view the clip when I enter the URL (http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... tar-SE.swf) manually, but it doesn't load on the page.

FF 2.0.0.3

[haard]

Crashes (or rather, the eternal cpu-flash-loop of DOOM) =\
FF 2.0.0.3 / Solaris 10

DOOOM! DOOM I TELL YOU!

[Hugh]

The image doesn't load for me. I can view the clip when I enter the URL (http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... tar-SE.swf) manually, but it doesn't load on the page.

FF 2.0.0.3

Seconded, and same with Opera (9.10, on Linux). Except Opera gives me a grey rectangle instead of the movie, even when accessing the direct URL.

And yes, I have Flash Player 9.

[Ace Pace]

Works perfectly fine here, Opera 9.02, loads up quickly even on my shitty connection.

[Darth Wong]

Hmmm, strange that so many people had trouble loading it. I modified something and re-uploaded it. Let me know if it's any better.

[Bounty]

It works on Firefox under XP, but I still get a black box in Linux.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Worked fine for me before, worked fine now.

[Jericho Kross]

Work all right from my computer.

[Bounty]

In Opera on Linux I get a grey box, so it may be OS-dependent.

[TithonusSyndrome]

It works fine for me, but it definetly gets me to wondering if this was the most crucial update the site needed or not.

[Darth Wong]

In Opera on Linux I get a grey box, so it may be OS-dependent.

I tried switching to FlowPlayer.swf for the Flash player app. Let's see if that works better on Linux.

It works fine for me, but it definetly gets me to wondering if this was the most crucial update the site needed or not.

How could it not be?

[Vympel]

How could it not be?

*points with dissatisfaction at the long neglected Episode III section*

[Ace Pace]

Update still works here.
Tested with IE7 as well, works fine.


Shame dosn't stream play but rather waits to DL everything then play.

[Darth Wong]

Update still works here.
Tested with IE7 as well, works fine.

Cool.

Shame dosn't stream play but rather waits to DL everything then play.

It's only a 6 second long clip, and apparently the default buffering on FlowPlayer is 10 seconds. I suppose I could try a longer clip just to see if it can stream. It's also possible to add sound (although I haven't tried that) or to hide the controls.

How could it not be?

*points with dissatisfaction at the long neglected Episode III section*

Party pooper

PS. There's a mod for phpBB that allows you to post Flash videos on the forum. I wonder if anyone would be interested in that.

[Hugh]

Let me know if it's any better.

It works fine in Linux now, at least with Firefox.

[Lord Poe]

PS. There's a mod for phpBB that allows you to post Flash videos on the forum. I wonder if anyone would be interested in that.

It could be nice, especially in debates. You should see it you can restrict the size to something like 400x400 though.

Any chance on getting that mod that acts like an alt-tag when you hover the mouse over a thread title to see the first post?

[Bounty]

It could be nice, especially in debates. You should see it you can restrict the size to something like 400x400 though.

And set it to *not* autoload the movie by default. Threads would get really painful otherwise.

[Starglider]

Any chance on getting that mod that acts like an alt-tag when you hover the mouse over a thread title to see the first post?

That does sounds useful. Plus if my currently-under-development 'enhanced polls mod' looks like it's going to be adopted, I'll do a general call for any minor enhancements people want bundled into it, now that I'm reasonably familiar with the phpBB code base and (insanely verbose) coding standards. I've already fixed a few miscellaneous bugs I noticed. Subject to Mike's approval of each enhancement of course.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Question: what does this do to dial-up users? Is it unreasonably punishing? Should I go back to the old static picture, or cut down on the size of this movie?

It took at most a couple minutes to load fully on my connection, but it seems worth it to me, since I'm used to loads that long for most things that aren't text and it lets one see how it flows together more easily than reading "x frames later."

[Darth Holbytlan]

The current version crashes my Firefox. Admittedly, I'm running the older version that comes with Debian Sarge, but it's still annoying.

[Tribun]

The first version worked fine on Opera.
Now that you've changed it, that damn thing is broken.

[Singular Intellect]

Worked fine for me. Great clip.

[darthbob88]

Takes a couple minutes, but works fine for me. FF 2.0.0.3, WinXP.