Acceptable download time for a video ?

[ronrosa]

Just wondering what everyone considers an acceptable amount of time to download a video.

I can play around with compression settings to make my videos have a higher resolution in exchange for a larger file size and longer download times.

As an example, for a 5 minute video, how long is an acceptable download time ?

 

[meekal]

hi RONROSA.... wish i could give you some feedback.... never did get much feedBack on my little experiment on compression comparisons.... but i still stand by my original conviction:

The size is a bit big, but it's in 640x480 instead of the 320x240 of the rest of the clips on this page, but then, with just everybody having a good Internet connection, it shouldn't be too bad. Dial up users.... so sorry.


http://piddlefish.servepics.com/SCUBA/video-1minTest.html

 

[HowardE]

I generally make videos that I want to share online into WMV's and use the 512k/sec which doesn't take more than 30 seconds to buffer, then it streams from there if you have a good speed connection.

I have varying size videos on my site http://howardandmichelle.com/dive

 

[ronrosa]

I've been trying to keep my videos below 20 mb. My biggest and longest video is around 20mb and 8 minutes long. If people have the patience and speed to handle larger file sizes I can increase the resolution.

 

[HowardE]

The Turks and Caicos started playing after about 10 seconds... that's totally fine.

 

[meekal]

ummm.... i guess ANOTHER question you should be asking is:

DOWNLOAD or STREAM the video.

STREAMING is much 'harder' at both ends....

my vote: download - always

 

[simonspear]

I'd agree that download is the way to go - I've watched streamed videos in the past and then gone back and watched them again and again and...well you get the point! That's a lot of bandwidth on your hosting server, but it's ok if you have an unlimited account of course.

As to file size then everyone who is prepared to download videos from the internet has pretty much got to have broadband anyway. Most files I've downloaded are around the 20 - 30 mb, which is a nice size, but personally I don't see a problem with them being larger.

Cheers, Simon

 

[HowardE]

ummm.... i guess ANOTHER question you should be asking is:

DOWNLOAD or STREAM the video.

STREAMING is much 'harder' at both ends....

my vote: download - always

Why is STREAMING harder? WMV's stream automatically... you don't have to do anything special to make them stream. streaming allows the viewer to watch a 12MB movie and only wait 15-30 seconds for the movie to begin.

It may take 5 - 6 minutes for a 12 MB movie to download, whereas if it's streaming, they're watching a 5-6 minute video almost the whole time.

 

[TSandM]

How long is an acceptable download time? It depends on how much I want to watch the video When a friend videotaped ME diving, it was a 93MB file, and there was a incompatibility problem with the format and my browser, and it took me several DAYS to get a successful download -- and when it loaded, it took about ten minutes. But I wanted to see it!

Most of the time, if a video is a big file and doesn't stream, I'll work on something else while it loads. I would rather have better quality and wait for it, but I have DSL so things do load relatively quickly.

 

[HowardE]

How long is an acceptable download time? It depends on how much I want to watch the video When a friend videotaped ME diving, it was a 93MB file, and there was a incompatibility problem with the format and my browser, and it took me several DAYS to get a successful download -- and when it loaded, it took about ten minutes. But I wanted to see it!

Most of the time, if a video is a big file and doesn't stream, I'll work on something else while it loads. I would rather have better quality and wait for it, but I have DSL so things do load relatively quickly.

Who posts a 93MB video online? (not sounding aggressive, just inquisitive) I generally compress the version that I'm going to post. I am guessing that this person left their video image LARGE, and with minimal compression, or else it's a 30 minute video?

Generally for videos to share online, I see them as being clips, rather than movies. I try to keep the "clips" to 5 minutes or so. This way, it stays interesting for the viewer, and the file sizes are more reasonable.