Jumping around a number of the live streams of Live Earth, my first impressions are extremely positive. Sound and video quality are both high, and the IE version of the player, using Flash, makes easy to jump between the different venues around the world. The “full screen” isn’t quite full screen at all, but delivers a decent size for the quality. If you right click on the player, however, you’ll see two options: “Enlarge” and “Full Screen.” Looks like they only want you to enlarge using the player’s buttons to keep a higher level of picture quality, but a comparison of the enlarged and full screen video quality is below (Jack Johnson set, from Australia.) Both are excellent.
The Firefox version, using Quicktime as its streaming format, requires you to go back to the main page to switch between venues and lacks the other interactive features such as links to make your global pledges, photo galleries, and an interactive map.
The audio streams have been consistent, whether they are from DC, London or Australia and South Africa. No drop outs at all. Is anyone else streaming this thing or did they really button up their CDN and bandwidth contracts? I also have the live broadcast on the TV, and there’s a good 5 minute delay between the television broadcast and the “live” stream. Metallica is just finishing up “Sad But True” on TV, but is two full songs (at least) behind online, just closing “Nothing Else Matters” and rolling into “Enter Sandman.” (Edit 4:20pm: Check that. Seems the streams are ahead of the TV broadcast. Ludacris has been streaming for the past 20 mins, but was just introduced on TV. Hmmm.)
Here’s screenshots comparing the two player experiences:
Using IE:
and the Firefox version:
the enlarged version of Jack Johnson:
full screen video of Jack Johnson:
Overall, the Live Earth streams get two big green thumbs up. Great job for a great cause. In case you missed it, here’s a sample of a few streams that I grabbed. There’s some minor quality loss due to the encoding to WMV to make the mix. LiveEarth will be releasing most of the show in clips for people to share virally shortly after the show.
You must be from another planet, or something — I tried to watch a few videos on Sat. and most of the “video” amounted to nothing more than a still frame that occasionally caught up to the audio, but then stopped every 15 seconds (both audio and video) while a “buffering” comment came up for 10 seconds or so. Even today, Monday, I tried to watch the Madonna video being hyped on the MSN site, and the video consisted of one still frame every 5 seconds or so. Similar results on 2 different computers.
I know you will probably say somthing like “Oh, you need to configure your blah-blah blah”, or “you should be using blah-blah blah viewer”, or something like that, but, dammit, when I open IE and up pops a window that says “click on this to watch Live Earth”, I expect it to run seamlessly. By the way, I have fiber internet running at 15 mb/s. ???????
Just planet Earth, Dan. Not sure what to tell you, other than we had very different experiences. I couldn’t have been happier with the quality of the audio and video. And if you search back through my previous posts, you’ll find that I’m no fan of MSN video. I was extremely skeptical about the quality going in, but was very pleasantly surprised.
This morning, as well, I had no problems loading up a stream and forwarding an email to friends directly from the player. General consensus from the people that I’ve spoken with is that people are impressed with the quality.
I’m sorry that your experience was disappointing, but I’m still giving MSN, Live Earth and Control Room two big thumbs up for the event. Guess I should say “your mileage may vary.”