How to Enable Seek Bar when Viewed in Full Screen

[ant007]

Hi All!

Does anyone know how to enable the seek bar when you view an AVI etc in Full Screen Mode?

Also, what is the best resolution (for compatiblity) to use? Would 800x600 be the most common?

Thanks in advance to anyone who tries to help out.

Kevin...*

[Corey]

Re: How to Enable Seek Bar when Viewed in Full Screen

Hi.

1. The "show controls in full screen" option is set by the user in their own media player preferences, you can't alter that via AMS that I know of.

2. I wouldn't distribute video at anything larger than 640 X 480 personally. The problem is thatif your end user has no vidcard (onboard only) or an old vidcard, 800 X 600 will not usually play back well, even 640 X 480 can get sketchy... On the other hand if you know exactly who your end users are and that they have good vidcards 800 X 600 can work fine, i.e. if your end users are all high-end gamers then you can be pretty certain they will all have good monitors and vidcards, but if your end users are public high school students in public school computer labs then they most likely won't. Play to the crowd as Elvis said.

Hope that helps...


Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[eric_darling]

Re: How to Enable Seek Bar when Viewed in Full Screen

I wouldn't distribute video at anything larger than 640 X 480 personally.

Just to add to what Corey said, I agree. To distribute video at 640x480 makes your video twice as likely to fail on playback than a traditional 320x240 clip (with all other factors being the same). Unless you are simply scaling on the fly from a smaller clip, you are adding tons of data into your file (if it's native 640x480). This is bad news for those of us who distribute on CD-ROM, which never spins as fast as the slowest of hard drives.

So, if you are wanting to distribute 640x480 video, I would recommend starting with a 320x240 clip and line-doubling it (scaling on the fly). That makes just a little extra work for your video card, which nowadays should be able to handle such a task with ease.

Going bigger? You had best be talking HD, because otherwise, no standard definition video editing software/hardware that I know of will handle 800x600 natively. So, the end result will absolutely necessitate an ugly up-rez of 640x480 (NTSC square pixel), or 720x480 (NTSC DV) media. Not a pleasant viewing experience.

[sponge]

Re: How to Enable Seek Bar when Viewed in Full Screen

What happens if you want to capture your screen and mouse movements for a basic tutorial on how to send an email etc. You really don't have an option to capture the screen at anything less than 640x480, or if your using Windows XP 800x600.

Does anyone have any hints or tips to achieving this? Essentially, I want to distribute the Autoplay Package at a resolution of 800x600, and have it play all video content play full screen with the seekbar, pause, rewind, fast forward, and stop button visible.

[Corey]

Re: How to Enable Seek Bar when Viewed in Full Screen

(Correct me if I'm wrong here Eric) Can't you achieve this by just telling the video in a Media Player Object to play fullscreen? Incidentally, and I think Eric will agree here, about the only video application which I *would* deploy at above 640 X 480 would be tutorial videos, in which case 800 X 600 is fine because:

1. Majority of people watching video tutes have reasonable computer with reasonable video.

2. 800 X 600 will look fine at fullscreen too usually.

3. The nature of the video is very low action so the frame rate can be reduced and the data rate can also be dramatically reduced vis-a-vis typical video content. You can also use a compression codec such as Techsmith to bring the file size way down.

4. Because of the nature of the *vocal only* audio track you can bring the size of the audio stream down dramatically in comparison to typical video soundtracks such as that from TV shows, etc.

5. In the end the reduction in data rate afforded by typical *screencap video tutorial* material is significant enough to allow it to playback at 800 X 600 on most typical consumer systems.

Many office computers have no video cards at all so you are relying on the integrated video performance and a lot of office computers have cheap motherboards with 4MB video, etc. SO beware of this. Make sure you bring your total data rate down very low if you plan to deploy to office set. Eric is better qualified to quantify the rates but I've been led to believe that if you can keep your data rate down to about 250K/sec you should be OK. (Correct me if I'm wrong please Eric)


Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[eric_darling]

Re: How to Enable Seek Bar when Viewed in Full Screen

I think the concern here is that when you tell an object to play full screen, that the progress bar and essential playback controls disappear. I think that with WiMP pre-9 you're not going to see those controls come back when you move the mouse (like you do in version 9), so it is a bit of a concern that users won't be readily likely to know how to get those controls back again.

[Corey]

Re: How to Enable Seek Bar when Viewed in Full Screen

Yeah, depends on whether the user has their options set to show controls in full screen...

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software