New General Conference Online Video Player
This weekend’s general conference will feature a new online video player using the super fantastic Move Networks streaming technologyz. The live video will be available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and American Sign Language. The quality of the video is quite amazing. The better your connection, the sharper the picture. (Try the fullscreen.) And it is crazy fast.
Each talk, musical number, prayer and conducting will be “clipped” for easy navigation. You can watch it live beginning tomorrow at 10:00 am MST (12:00 pm EST).
Rob Jex and Brian Hansbrow led product management of the online General Conference. Chris Mayfield, Wayne Pullman and I designed the new player. Darin Warren developed the flash player. Brent Lewis, Tyler Dalton, Travis Foxley, Mindie Sorenson, Chris Jones, Chris Twitty, Vicki Bird, Bill Bush and many others helped put it on the site with many hours of testing (I’m sure I missed others).
And lastly, thank you to the great people of Move Networks who helped us provide this great service. Wish us luck! (We hope we can handle all of the load this weekend.)
And please give us your feedback. Thank you!
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Comments
I just tried the new player. WOW!!! Absolutely amazing! The full-screen quality totally blew me away. Like you, I hope that the Church servers can handle the load during the live sessions this weekend. It’s amazing to think of the difference between the quality of this version and the first live online video feed from many years ago. HUGE kudos to all involved!
Great player! I love the thumb nail menu below for selecting clips.
We watched the broadcast last Saturday. It works great on IE. But it doesn’t like Firefox - it tries to install and then dies with a message about an unexpected error and asked to restart Firefox. It keeps repeating this cycle. After a few of these restarts, it will try to launch but hangs. Maybe I’m the only one having this issue with Firefox…so we’ll watch it on IE 7 instead. Yes, the online video availability of General Conference has been a huge improvement over the years. Thanks for the great work.
I use Firefox 3.0 and didn’t experience any hiccups. Then again, I wasn’t prompted to install anything when I accessed the page. Could it be because I have the latest version of the Move Networks plugin from the recent video player upgrade over at http://www.byu.tv? That site was always our conference video mainstay over the past few years.
The video quality was excellent, perhaps even approaching the so-called “HD” streaming video that Move provides for ABC.com on its site. Full-screen mode is beautifully non-intrusive visually. Big thumbs up!
I too was unable to open it in Firefox but had no problems with Explorer. I use the Move Network for BYU tv in Firefox with no problem so do not understand why it would not work for Conference
The Move Networks is indeed an excellent quality player.
But how about instead a player with true cross-platform support, including Linux? I realize that Move Networks has mad noises about supporting Linux, but so have other companies (Netflix for one) that do streaming video — and very few have delivered so far (Hulu has, albeit with a few minor bugs).
I’m actually quite content to stream audio from Classical 89 — takes me back to my Utah childhood. And if my family and I were dying for video we could always go to the ward building or subscribe to dish network. But both those options cost money.
I’m thankful for the audio, but I would definitely use the video if Linux was supported.
I successfully downloaded the new media player but I am not being able to watch the live sessions. It just keeps showing the Relief Society Meeting over and over again. Why? How or what can I do to watch today and tomorrow’s live sessions on the internet?
I would appreciate your help.
Thanks
Adriana from Argentina
Adriana, at the time I posted this blog entry conference has not begun yet. Will you try it again?
Doesn’t work with Linux.
Watching on Firefox 3.0 on Mac - absolutely fantastic. Love the fullscreen. It’s crisp, clean, and I really don’t mind not having DirecTV now.
Great work!
Yes, the quality is really amazing, especially at full screen on my 19″ widescreen monitor. It worked fine in Internet Explorer, but repeatedly crashed in Firefox 3 on Windows Vista.
For the most part, it seemed to handle the load just fine. A few momentary hiccups, but that could have just been due to my ISP.
Fantastic work. The quality is over the top. I hook my computer up to my HDTV and most of the time the quality beats my cable quality. Again, excellent work.
I have to say, on top of the quality of the video the visual design of the player and page are really great. The old Move player had a little too much “chrome.” This one doesn’t get in the way of the video, but still offers easy access to the archived video. Congrats.
Thanks everyone for your compliments and bug reports. We definitely need to work out some of these crashes. Please pass the link along to friends and family. We’d love to share this as much as we can.
Awesome video player. The clarity was better than TV or the stake center’s satellite broadcast. Is this something we can market to others? I’m sure NBC would love it for the next Olympics.
@Todd The streaming video technology is actually not owned by the Church but an independent company called Move Networks. They actually offer the same technology to ABC.com.
Our family loved the new player. In fact, my wife says that she prefers it to the TV. As a fellow software developer, congratulations to the entire team. You hit this one out of the park!
We’ve already been using the amazing and wonderful Move networks player for watching BYUTV. (Our browser is the latest version of Firefox).
It had great quality for picture and sound, way better than the quality of years past.
But we also had lots of hiccups. Perhaps because of high traffic?
It was frustrating but also humorous in a couple of spots. Like during the closing prayer. We and our three boys continued to be reverent. . .about 30 seconds went by. . . and then one of my boys looked up and said, “AMEN!”
I think we’ll try it on IE today, just in case that helps.
Unfortunately, my computer continually “buffered” the video/audio stream every few seconds so my viewing experience was not good to say the least. Perhaps it was my computer. Same thing happened both days.
Looks great in Safari 3.1.2!
Quality: 8.5/10 for video
Ease of use: 8/10
Robustness and reliability: 4/10
Ease of troubleshooting: 0/10
It got bad enough that my family (for the second time in 2 days) threatened to drive to the church if I couldn’t get it working.
I still don’t understand why we can’t get the mp4 videos immediately after airing.
Is there a way to link to individual talks? We need to be able to Digg and tweet individual talks.
@Ben There isn’t a way to do that yet but we’re working on it. I don’t know when that will be available but we hope soon. It would definitely make it easier to share.
On Saturday the stream came through great and ran for hours without any problems. Sunday morning was a different story. We could not get through more than five minutes without the system (Vista 64-bit) locking up. I realized that Windows Update had installed a new video driver Saturday night. I updated my BIOS and after that the problem went away. This stream is wonderful. Thank you for all of your efforts to make this work. I really enjoy this blog too. Keep up the great work!
Thank you…it was a wonderful connection for us here in Auckland NZ. No glitches aT all.
I just happened to look on lds.org and thought I’d try the internet version of conference. We were already watching it live on Dish Network. I was stunned at the quality of your product. It was better than TV. I showed it on our 25″ IMac and it was beautiful. WOW!!
I went online today to try to figure out what company did this so I could thank them. So Thanks!!
The conference video was exceptional. When viewed at the highest quality, what effective resolution can be seen? The peak data rate was about 4.2Mbps, averaging 2Mbps typically on windows task master.
Along with those who asked that this be made available on the Linux platform, I add my comments:
If the church sent out media streams in the ogm and/or ogg formats, then that would allow users of Windows, Mac, Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, BeOS, OS/2, . to view and/or listen to conference. (Based on http://www.vorbis.com/software/ .)
I understand in the past disk space and cost were issues with streaming conference in both windows media and Real Audio formats. (Based on previous personal communications with the Church)
Almost universally speaking, the ogm and ogg formats take less space and bandwidth for better quality than the currently-used MP3 formats. (Based on http://vorbis.com/faq/#_fan and http://vorbis.com/faq/#_quality)
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If the church is required to pay royalties because they are currently using the MP3 format, then it would also free up dollars for the church. (Based on http://vorbis.com/faq/#flic )
If the church is building its own player , then why build one that ONLY works for your Windows users and which is required to be installed by the user? Why not, then, allow this player to play the ogm and ogg streams?
The ogm and ogg formats have more capabilities (such as chapters (i.e. Individual speakers) and metadata (i.e. Title of talks)) for the Church to take advantage of as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats
For more details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_Media
I am not associated in any way to or with any company or organizations relating to my suggestions above.
Post Script: Is WordPress set to limit the amount of text a user can post? If so, then you might want to let your users know of this limit. I had to break mine up into two parts.
New player is terrible, it crashes IE, Firefox on my computer and it keeps restarting on my wife’s computer. Please, no more website with this trash.
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