I embedded some videos on a site I am building. The videos are hosted on Vemeo. They will be viewed in a ‘LightBox’ type of window when launched. The JQuery script I used is named ColorBox.
The videos seem to play fine but on some machines playback starts out stalled and jaggy. If I was creating a Flash site the obvious answer would be to create a preloader but this site is entirely xHTML and JavaScript.
Anyone know how to improve playback for embedded videos? Is there a way to create a preloader or some such similar solution?
Generally hosted videos have a buffer in them already, so it’s possible that it’s not that.
If it really is just taking time to load, there isn’t much that you can do about that other than having the users wait a few seconds (you can’t really control that with JS though, without doing something that would make it so the video isn’t buffering).
However, it’s also possible that something in your Javascript is causing the video to lag on slower machines. I would try disabling all of your Javascript and see if the video plays back any better, then go from there.
You may want to look into reducing the bitrate and/or display size of the videos you’re using. Some internet connections can’t handle higher bitrates and will slow the video