Video resolution vs. low bandwidth access

[Riccardo Giovanetti]

Hello,

I am a subscriber from several years now and I have a huge issue with watching the online videos on CG Cookie. Because in many cases they are available only at high resolution (1024), since I don’t have an high speed Internet connection (I don’t think I am the only one having this issue), it would be very much appreciated if you could make all the videos available at lower resolution/quality too, so I will not consume all my bandwidth for the entire week with just downloading a couple of videos.

In many situations I had to give up watching interesting contents just because of that.

Please, could you consider the above and let me know?

Thank you in anticipation and best regards,

Riccardo Giovanetti
(Harvester)

[Jonathan Gonzalez]

Are you referring to video downloads themselves or the resolution of the streaming videos? The resolution of the videos being streamed can be adjusted on the video player (the gear icon). As far as providing different resolutions of the video downloads, it’s highly unlikely we would provide that. It would be a lot of extra work to provide the same videos at different resolutions, not to mention we’d be down scaling everything which may result in weird video artifacts. We do compress all of our videos so they are as small as we can get them without affecting the quality. 

[Riccardo Giovanetti]

@jgonzalez I am talking in general but yes, the streamed videos should be viewable also at a lower resolution, while some of the videos online on the website are available at lower resolution than 1024 but many others don’t. In short, your reply is negative, right? OK, thank you.

[Jonathan Gonzalez]

@harvester Which videos are not streamed at a lower resolution? These are dynamically lowered through our video host. Just to be clear, are you referring to this on the video player? 

[Riccardo Giovanetti]

@jgonzalez Yes, it’s that I am referring to, thank you for your question. Have you done something in the meantime? Because it seems now that I can change the quality level for all the videos in the website. What happened before was that for several videos the only quality level available was 1080p. 

One question about the video download button: is it in sync with the video quality of the video being viewed or its resolution is fixed?

Thank you for taking care of this.

[Riccardo Giovanetti]

@jgonzalez Apparently I was wrong because the recent course on the treasure chest can be watched only at 1080p, there’s no other options available. Sorry for the misleading feedback.

[Jonathan Gonzalez]

I haven’t done anything to the videos. We tend to upload the videos in 1080 (some may be 720) then Wistia (our video hosting service) automatically provides different resolutions similar to how Youtube does things.The “auto” mode allows the video to be streamed based on the perceived connection speed it detects. So if you have a slower connection it may default to 540, but a faster connection may stay on 720 or 1080. 

It does seem a bit odd that some random videos tend to be stuck on 1080. I haven’t found a cause for this so it’s something we’ll need to get in contact with Wistia about to find out why this happened. As far as I know there is nothing on our end that is causing this.

[Riccardo Giovanetti]

@jgonzalez Thank you for checking this, and perhaps I have to be more patient and wait until Wistia converts the latest videos. Just because the application detects a good bandwidth (it varies a lot during the day) it doesn’t mean I shall use it in full, that’s the reason for my question about the video quality/resolution.

I am curious to read the Wistia’s reply.

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