Why use OGV?

[Assimilater]

I have jplayer on my site and have been attempting to get some relatively fast content, i've done this by getting an amazon web services account and setting up a cloudfront distribution. However the result has been very hangy. I've followed the tutorial format of using M4V/MP4 and OGV/OGG formats, and notice that the OGG files are significantly larger than the MP4 files, on the front page it's listed for both html5 and flash support so i'm wondering if/why i need it and if it might be the cause of such a slow buffering result...

[Mark Panaghiston]

The OGV/OGG files are only required if you want to use the native HTML5 media players on browsers such as Firefox and opera. If you do not care about those browsers using the Flash fallback, then just use M4V/MP4 files.

If you want to improve HTML5 native support you might want to use WebM format instead, it is superior to OGG. The audio codec is the same, but the video codec is better. OGG uses Theora. WebM uses VP8. Chrome, Firefox and Opera support WebM media. IE9 can install it easily, but I am not sure how well it will give you the prompt through jPlayer. I should try that one day.

Like I said though, using only M4V files are fine and jPlayer will play the media through either the HTML or Flash solution depending on the browser being used to view it.

[Assimilater]

I guess what i don't understand are the speed issues i'm dealing with. First off on this page:

http://callserver.dyndns.biz:90/index.php?action=TestVid&ID=2

if i take off the ovg then the video doesn't even play, just the audio (at least in firefox). With or without it I'm experiencing serious buffering issues, a wide range of people report the video "hanging" up. In a speed test someone else did in #web on freenode.net they reported downloading the whole file in 5 seconds, which tells me the determining factor is the user's internet speed. but with my average of 160KB/s download rate i can view the videos hosted on youtube without buffering issues, and i'm wondering where the difference lies.

[Mark Panaghiston]

Check you are using the recommended encoding for the M4V files:
http://www.jplayer.org/latest/developer-guide/#jPlayer-media-encoding

It looks like the Flash is not happy with the way your media is encoded.

I take it you are toggling the OGA files on and off the easy way?
By setting {supplied:"m4v"}

As for speed issues... Firefox was using the OGV files and they seemed to download fast enough for me. Way before the video ended.

Buffering though... jPlayer is not too sensible with the buffering. The Flash will play it in short parts as they become available. The HTML5 media seems to do a similar thing, playing it in small parts. Youtube's Flash player tends to buffer it more sensibly and waits for a larger chunk to download and be ready before continuing.

[Aaragorn]

Mark, I am having the same issues as Assimilater. I am using Miro to do the file conversion but I don't see anywhere to adjust encoding. What is encoding? What would make a video hang 2 or 5 seconds in like this at the same spot on each video individually but on different videos it hangs in different spots. One video hangs just 2 seconds into it. Another video hangs 11 seconds into it. I converted my files using Miro and got small file sizes I think that may help but I don't understand why one hangs at one spot and another hangs at another spot. I don't know what is going on 'under the hood' to make them behave so randomly. I don't know where to get the tools to analyze or adjust these videos. Can you shed some light on this?

[Assimilater]

I think we got most of the encoding issues sorted out...for the most part it appears to work fine.