The New Flash Player Lives!
I’m sure many of you have already noticed that the new Flash player went live this week. I just wanted to open the comments for any feedback you guys have on it. It’s really important to us that 1) you like it and 2) it works correctly. So post your thoughts, positive, negative or mixed in the comments.
Tags: flash, flash player
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:46 pm
It looks a lot better. Very clean design.
It would be good to have it a bit clearer, but it’s o.k. really.
Maybe some future added features:
1. slo-mo. heh.
2. option to have the crawl at the bottom only if you click the video and hide when you click it again (like it does now)instead of automatic when you hover.
3. option to stream to windows media player without downloading first? I know you sorta can do it now, but there is no control until the whole file is d/l’d
All in all, I like it – a nice improvement to the controls and overall feel.
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Great !!
September 3rd, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Alison:
will try to get to checking it out soon. will let you know what i think when i do,but i am not too great at describing how i like or don’t like things of a technical nature.i am pretty sure any changes would be for the better as i was definitely not a fan of the old system
September 3rd, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Allison: Did the Tech guy respond to my questions about the widescreen?
The videos are finally aligned to the center via full view mode on Mac. So that’s fixed.
I was confused initially on how to move the previews back and forth so that I could skip to certain parts, this did not happen with the old player. I just thought I might share that with you.
The encoding quality of the videos feels like it could still be improved, it just feels like the compression is a bit high or the bitrate is too low for the High-resolution option.
The overall design of the new player doesn’t seem like it fit with the color design of the videobox, just seems a bit dark compared to the site.
Beside the few negatives above, the overall experience while could still be better, is very good. So good, i had to cancel my current plan so that i could resubscribe with the 10 month plan.
September 3rd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
It’s kinda weird that you can’t click on the filmstrip anymore to move ahead to the next minute and also how the filmstrip moves as the film goes along. Agree w/ idisme on the fact of Windows. Love to be able to scroll ahead in the given high/medium/low quality format without having to wait for the whole file to download. Very annoying if you download and there’s like 5 or 10 minutes of setup before the action starts. Love to scroll through all that shit! Usually just trash those downloads and move onto something else.
September 3rd, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Sorry. I noticed you can make a custom clip and d/l it in dvd, high, medium.. Whoops.
September 3rd, 2008 at 4:38 pm
The new player is a nice design, but is very pixelated.Need to improve picture quality.Maybe bring back former player until the video quality issue has been resolved.
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:26 pm
It’s minor compared to all the good….but….Why do we get so many videos that play upside-down in the flashplayer ?
September 3rd, 2008 at 7:59 pm
niiiiiicccccccceeee – thanks!
September 3rd, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Please add the ability to click on the video itself to pause instead of just the button. Also some text notifications when I hover over buttons telling me what they do.
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:09 pm
The streaming isn’t as smooth as it was with the old player. There are many times where it pauses for buffering. There are times where it is *extremely choppy*. I literally never saw that with the old player. I also have had many “error” messages within this new player. This was tested on two Comcast cable connections and one connected connected via fiber directly to a backbone (Ethernet) with similar results.
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:19 pm
ASPECT RATIO!!!
How come you guys don’t know how to fix / post the proper aspect ratio for movies (i.e. the newest one with the bottles).
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Looks quite good overall. I did not see any problems with pixelation or chopiness, although I do watch in low-res.
I do find it very difficult to grab the forward/back control slider without losing my current place. That makes it hard to do a little jog forward or back.
Also, I second the request for text when you hover over buttons.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:28 am
Poor Picture Quality compared to old player
September 4th, 2008 at 4:41 am
Gotta LOVE the preview scrolling by at the bottom! Very good for porn — that way you know what’s coming up and have an easy way to scroll to the perfect spot for you to nust a butt.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:47 am
One thing I would like to add, though, is that the video plays more smoothly when the scroll bar IS showing.
September 4th, 2008 at 6:03 am
The video quality is truly awful compared to the old player. In the end, that is far more important than anything else. I hope it will be improved or my days at videobox are numbered…
September 4th, 2008 at 8:55 am
The old player was fine. The video quality is horrible now. Its way too pixelated and I get the feeling you’ve invested way too much into the new style to change it now.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Also, when you skip around in a scene it takes a second to load. It really is only a second, but it’s kinda annoying when you’re trying to scan through a scene. I always liked the fact that you didn’t have to download movies to watch them on this site, so fucking with the flash player really changes that. It doesn’t even look that great style-wise. I know its not important, but the color scheme doesn’t match the rest of the site so it looks obtrusive. Maybe I’m just too used to the old player.
September 4th, 2008 at 10:31 am
the update seemed to lose resolution – i’m not sure that it is better than the old
September 4th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Works fine for me but then so did the old player, I think it’s a slight improvement.
September 4th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Very disappointed that there is no longer a high res. option. I agree with a previous poster that my days with Videobox are numbered unless this is remedied. Its unfortunate, as I will now be required to download and use much more Videobox bandwidth.
September 4th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
really nice. great job
September 4th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Hi there. The player is really nice, but everytime I acess Videobox and Videoboxmen I have notice the 2 websites are slow and more slow everytime I access them… Could you improve the speed of the website loadings? thnaks..
September 4th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Why not hi-resolution now ????
September 4th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Hey guys – Thanks for your feedback. We are having a little trouble with the video quality on the new player, but I assure you that we’re working on it and it’ll be fixed. So we didn’t get rid of the hi-res option, we’re just in the process of getting the player up to speed. I’m really sorry for the inconvenience.
September 4th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Am i stupid – i cant even find it??? The player that is.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
aaaaaahhhh yeeeeaaahhhhhhh droppin’ loads!!!!
September 4th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
alison: please inform us when it is fixed so we can get back with more feedback on that.
September 4th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Don’t threaten to leave, you know you paid for the full year!
September 4th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Alison:
big improvement. much easier to navigate and go to where you want to go with it the way it is now.
Off Topic but pertaining to the Haley Paige blog of Rope’s. i find it amazing that so many people on this site and others have been so deeply touched by her life and loss. i knew rope and i were very sad when we heard she had died. she had a special quality i have never seen before in a porn actress.she worked in an area where tragic deaths are commonplace but i have never seen any of these losses that touched people as much as her. Maybe we could do a future blog on what made her loss so different,that made people care so deeply.
Thanks for listening back to main subject. i am not very knowledgeable when it comes to describing technical aspects of flash players but i do see definite improvement. so a big cyberhug to Alison
September 4th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
also what is the news on the aspect ratio?
September 4th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
i DONT EVEN KNOW WHERE IT IS??CAN SUMONE HELP?
September 5th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Looks great,good job. A+
September 5th, 2008 at 3:06 am
This new player is terrible. The picture is choppy and fuzzy, as well as highly pixellated. The fast foward process also sucks. Overall, this is a loser. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
September 5th, 2008 at 4:08 am
Video resolution is really bad. Since I have limited disk space (MB Air) I rarely dl videos, and do most of my “activities” with the player, which was much better in the previous version. I hope this improves
September 5th, 2008 at 6:44 am
The best things about the new player: (1) Detaching the preview location scroller. (2) Trending the instant of film that you’re actually watching to the CENTER of the filmstrip as it’s located on your screen. This solves the problem of “filmstrip auto-advance” whenever you happened to click an area of preview that was near a filmstrip “page turn”
One addition that would be nice: Making volume a slider. Currently, I can only set volume by clicking – which is a pain when you want to adjust the volume small amounts.
September 5th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Luke Wilson – Click the Play Now button. Or try this link: http://www.videobox.com/flash.jtp?id=4117079
Mike – You got it.
HotScooter2 – Thanks. Cyberhug back at ya.
chopper3 – Thank you.
Jack4940 – The pixelation problem is being looked at, but I’m curious why you don’t like the fast forward process.
El Guapo – I’ll keep you updated. There’s no doubt it’ll be fixed.
Ditto – That’s an interesting point about the volume control. I’ll pass that along.
September 5th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I really like the auto-scrolling of the timeline pane. Is it possible to make that go a tad faster or have an option to speed it up? I would like to be able to see a little farther ahead of whats actually playing so I can skip whats coming up or other things like that.
September 6th, 2008 at 9:43 am
What’s the chance of getting DIVX format on this site? It’d save me some conversion time on the vids.. I prefer to put them on DVD and then watch them in the comfort of my bedroom.. Its awkward taking care of business in my chair at my desk, sometimes need some privacy from the wifey.
September 6th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Doesn’t seem to work well in the new Google Chrome web browser. It gets really choppy if you skip ahead in the scene.
I still prefer the previous flash player.
September 6th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Like the new player looks great would like a better volume control. One problem that i really had was when going into full screen mode and the cursor and bottom of the player have gone away it won’t let me exit full screen mode esc button don’t work and mouse don’t re-appear.
September 7th, 2008 at 3:53 am
I like it. And for all you ppl who are like “the Quality is bad” did you not see the icon beside the fullscreen button?? that changes the quality from low to high. I think they made this option so it loads faster on slower connections (for low) but if you have broadband (like me) just switch to High. It actually looks a bit better than it did before
September 7th, 2008 at 6:22 am
I don’t like the new flash because it takes FOREVER to see the filmstrip images. Film strip viewing was my primary task for deciding which clip to watch. Now that you’ve taken that away, I have to spend more time clicking “custom” button just to see one set of pictures at a time.
September 7th, 2008 at 10:09 am
I like the new controls, but as enigmamonkey mentioned above, the player gets choppy in fullscreen when the controls aren’t visible. The old player had the same issue when you weren’t using an exact 4:3 resolution (1280×1024 would be choppy in my case, 1280×960 would be smooth), but the new player is choppy at either resolution once the controls fade out.
Also, there definitely needs to be help text associated with the buttons. That, or the button for changing the resolution simply has a confusing and uninformative icon. Took me a while to figure out what it was doing.
September 7th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Tito69 – We don’t plan to offer DivX. I use DVD Flick (http://www.dvdflick.net) to burn H.264 format to DVD. It’s a free open source program that’s pretty powerful. You might want to check it out to save yourself a little time.
September 8th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Definitely a decrease in video quality with the new player. Assuming it’s a bandwidth cost-reduction action, but it’s important to get the old/better quality back to not lose customers IMO if you can afford the b/w costs.
September 8th, 2008 at 9:25 am
OK, just saw Xcom923’s comment from Sept 7th – there is the little icon to left of fullscreen Icon allows toggling between quality levels. Testing it now, seems HIGH is a bit better as Xcom293 says. And it retained the HIGH setting between logins. Thanks Xcom293!
September 8th, 2008 at 10:36 am
I don’t like how the lower filmstrip takes FOREVER to show up if you start a movie towards the end. This didn’t seem to be an issue with the old player…
September 9th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I can’t get it to work with Google Chrome so thats a bummer. My favorite feature of the old player was being able to click the far side of the filmstrip and being able to jump forward quickly.
I would love an option to jump forward a minute or five because it scrolls very slow with this new player, I have to click drag the progress bar.
September 12th, 2008 at 10:02 am
I agree 100% with jcasey86. I HATE THE SCROLLING BAR–with the old one you could click the far right and jump ahead. This may seem trivial, but it’s actually a big deal with how I watch the movies now. With the old one you could just keep the mouse in the same spot and click to jump ahead, but now that the scroll recenters, clicking repeatedly on the far right jumps the video forward only incrementally.
PLEASE just disable the auto-center on the scrollbar preview, you would still get the benefit of all the new flash player’s improvements, but fix a major step back.
September 13th, 2008 at 8:14 am
Argggh. Not working for me in firefox 3. I’m sure its a prob on my end since no one else is reporting it. Works great in explorer.
September 13th, 2008 at 9:29 am
OK, I can see how some ppl might hate the scrolling but I think it’s a good idea. A better compromise would be a switch so you can turn it on and off.
September 18th, 2008 at 11:17 am
My only issue is the “skip ahead” feature being gone – what was described previously:
dudemandude Says:
September 12th, 2008 at 10:02 am
I agree 100% with jcasey86. I HATE THE SCROLLING BAR–with the old one you could click the far right and jump ahead. This may seem trivial, but it’s actually a big deal with how I watch the movies now. With the old one you could just keep the mouse in the same spot and click to jump ahead, but now that the scroll recenters, clicking repeatedly on the far right jumps the video forward only incrementally.
Any thoughts on this Alison?
September 20th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
We really need the skip ahead feature. I would have to think that the majority of people don’t sit through an watch a whole movie start to finish. I like to jump forward by clicking the far side of the old player.
If you could make it so the filmstrip doesn’t move with the slide bar it would be much better!
September 21st, 2008 at 8:46 am
I’m using Firefox 3 and the playback controls get cut off and are completely inaccessible — in other words, it’s totally BROKEN in Firefox 3. It works fine in IE, but it’s a bit of a pain to have to switch browsers every time I want to use the player.
Is anyone else having this problem? Surely there must be more Firefox users out there?
September 21st, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I think the only issue is the inability to resize the window (at least it wont let me do it in Firefox 3.0).
October 11th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Hey! I just noticed today that the filmstrip has improved – we can now “skip ahead” by clicking on the far right like we used to. Quality seems to have improved too (I think that got fixed a week or two ago). Most excellent! Thanks!!
November 13th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
The old player worked better. Much of the time the picture freezes or plays very slowly. Almost a deal breaker for me.
February 18th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Thanks for this, gonna add this as a site to watch