Low bandwidth versions of presentations (and lobby) Thread poster: Samuel Murray
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Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 01:02
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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G'day everyone
Once again, as with the previous conference, the video presentations on ProZ.com were designed to exclude translators from low-bandwidth countries.
A particular gripe of mine is the useless video presentations (or rather, the fact that useless technology is used to present them). I'm sure if you have fast internet, you'd prefer to see a video of nothing more than a talking head, but for those of us with slower internet, there is little more frustrating t... See more G'day everyone
Once again, as with the previous conference, the video presentations on ProZ.com were designed to exclude translators from low-bandwidth countries.
A particular gripe of mine is the useless video presentations (or rather, the fact that useless technology is used to present them). I'm sure if you have fast internet, you'd prefer to see a video of nothing more than a talking head, but for those of us with slower internet, there is little more frustrating than not being able to follow a speaker's voice simply because the speaker decided to include a large visual component with the file.
Take a look at the three largest on-demand videos of this year's conference:
The Future of Translation Leveraging Online Translation Marketplaces.flv
133 megabytes, of which 17 megabytes is sound
Duration: 35 minutes, plus 75 minutes of silence at the end of the file.
The presentation is basically a slide show, with related images used as the slides. In most cases, the images are merely something to look at while the speaker speaks, and do not contain any vital information. In fact, I think this presentation would have had exactly the same value if it was audio-only (except for people whose attention span is short and who need to see a variety of images while listening to a voice).
Empower yourself with Machine Translation.flv
112 megabytes, of which 24 megabytes is sound
Duration: 51 minutes
This presentation is a PowerPoint presentation with voice-over. Most of the slides contain all the text that the speaker is speaking (or: reading), so this presentation could easily have been done by giving the viewer just a text to read. A few of the slides contained workflow diagrams, but most of the slides are not crucial for understanding the presentation.
Taming The Thousand-faced Beast Anatomization of Linguistic Quality, Measuring The Opinion into the Fact.flv
91 megabytes, of which 8 megabytes is sound
Duration: 17 minutes
This presentation is a talking head, and a jerky one at that, with about 3 or 4 slides. If it had been sound-only, with perhaps reference documentation consisting of only the slides (perhaps in a PDF or something), it would have had no less value.
Fortunately for me, I was in a high-bandwidth country when the conference took place, so I was able to download all on-demand presentations in a minute or two each. With the previous conference, I was in a low-bandwidth country and I remember that it was virtually impossible to participate in any of the events, even though much of the technology used are perfectly capable of being relayed over a low-bandwidth connection.
I think ProZ.com should think about how to include people with slower internet into their activities. Obviously some systems can only be used with high bandwidth, e.g. interactive video streaming, but many other systems can be tailored with a low-bandwidth version.
For example, to view these on-demand videos, I had to go through the "lobby", which is a high-bandwidth flash file, but the actual pages on which the videos were embedded were ordinary HTML files. So if I knew the URLs for the video pages, I would have been able to go to those pages without having to load the slow-loading flash intro page that contains the "lobby", which (if we can be honest about it) is nothing more than a page with links, and some animations of people walking a few feet before disappearing and reappearing on the other side of the screen again. I'm tempted to suspect that the flash intro is actually there as a deliberate stumbling block to prevent slow-internet users from getting to the useful content. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Drew MacFadyen
United States
Local time: 19:02
Spanish to English
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| Working on solving this puzzle | Jul 28, 2011 |
Thanks Sam - always nice to hear from you. We have heard this complaint from both ends. When we strive to make the videos smaller from a file size standpoint, many of the finite mouse and window items (especially with software demos) tend to be fuzzy and illegible. When we ratchet up the quality we invariably push the file size to where it is an issue for low bandwidth users.
We will be enacting a couple of changes this year that I hope will help folks like yourself.
... See more Thanks Sam - always nice to hear from you. We have heard this complaint from both ends. When we strive to make the videos smaller from a file size standpoint, many of the finite mouse and window items (especially with software demos) tend to be fuzzy and illegible. When we ratchet up the quality we invariably push the file size to where it is an issue for low bandwidth users.
We will be enacting a couple of changes this year that I hope will help folks like yourself.
We will be identifying the ideal ratio between file size and quality through pre-event trial and error (I am doing this now). We will also be utilizing features in Camtasia to be able to pan and zoom in order for those software demos to be legible at lower resolution.
All the videos are pre-recorded, and if we have speakers record in enough time we will be encoding and creating multiple versions of the videos. The main streamed one that most interact with on the live day will be optimized as best as we can for both quality and file size, while we will attempt to also offer an archived smaller file version. This may be audio only, or a lower quality version. By viewing the low bandwidth option, attendees will not be viewing with all other attendees at the same time (i.e. not a shared user experience), but they will be able to pause the playback and allow the stream to buffer and watch without cutting audio or other bandwidth issues.
We're aware of the problem, and it is among the highest priority items to solve for this year. We want all of our community members to be able to engage with and learn from the content, so making it more accessible, in particular for low bandwidth sites is crucial.
Thanks Sam....hope to "see" you for our series of events this year.
Drew ▲ Collapse
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