When we open up a blog site or wiki or whatever it’s nice to see all the media there and ready to go, right? Not necessarily. The problem is that when the player is set to ‘automatic play’ it’ll load in the media file as soon as the page is opened. As an example, here’s a latest Moodle blog entry from my Choral Conducting class:
Choral Conducting blog video entry
The ‘track’ in the player is grey because it has fully loaded the video. And every video clip gets loaded in the same way as soon as the displaying page opens. Which means that you cannot do anything until all the players have cached their content. Not so bad on campus with a wired connection; a pain in the botty department at home via a DSL internet connection. Here’s an expanded view of the same page (which had 7 video clips on it) (click to see full size):
Choral Conducting blog video entry -- 3 videos
So, adding videos as blog postings evidently doesn’t scale up very well since they all get displayed on the same page. I’m not sure how many entries are displayed by the OUBlog before it paginates but there is no setting to change this. Now to come up with a workable alternative.
