voeveo

Hi Drew,
The reason we currently only show screenshots for videos is because showing the video itself raises a few problems. If we show just the start of the video it may just be 20 seconds of black screen or an intro - not something that would entice people to buy. And if we show the entire video, would someone still want to buy it after they've seen it in full? Video previews affecting the speed of the site is also something we have to consider.

However we have been trying to think of ways around this, and are coming up with ideas to allow proper video previews. For example, we could allow sellers to choose a fifteen second section of their video to preview (ie choose the start point that the preview will begin from), or allow sellers to upload their own preview file, separate to the video content itself.

Currently we do have a field during upload where the seller can enter a url for a video hosting site (eg Youtube), and buyers will see a "Watch the video" button on the content details page which will take them to this site.

As you can see, we have been thinking a lot about introducing better video previews - so any suggestions or ideas you might have would be very useful to us.

Hey Mike, I'm now switched on!!

I got confirmation email and managed to download a video.

can you tell me why it wasn't getting through before?

also, instead of my vids being shown as the size they are, they are stretched to fill the screen.Do you know of how I can overcome this? I wondered if I sholud upload the videos with some kind of black frame round it but not sure how.
am I making sense?

drew

Hi Drew,
Yes we discovered a bug that was affecting the delivery of confirmation messages to certain networks - we sent you a new confirmation message once it was fixed.

As for the video - we don't actually resize or rescale videos at all so the file you get on your phone should be exactly the same as the one you uploaded on the site. So it could be a result of the video conversion software that you are using, or your phone is automatically resizing the video in its player. The version of the Michael Caine video you uploaded had the dimensions 176x144 - is that the size its showing up on your phone?

The original file you uploaded does appear slightly squashed compared to the one on your site, perhaps I can suggest a couple of good free conversion tools:
- Zamzar - A great site that will convert files for free via email.
- Another good free piece of software is the Acala 3gp video converter which is available here.

Neither of these will convert from swf unfortunately, but can help you from the avi to 3gp stage. Hope that helps.

thanks Mike.

I've found I can add a black border to keep the file at the right shape and I used VirtualDub.

so I'm getting sorted.

thanks