Life's a Coast Video Blog

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Viewing the Videos

Embedded videos appear on the webpages as still picture images from the videos. You may start or stop playing a video by single left-clicking anywhere on the picture image of a video (it is not necessary to left-click directly on the triangular shaped "play" button).

Optimal viewing of the videos is accomplished with a broadband internet connection using a fast personal computer with sufficient memory. It is also reccommended that while viewing videos that you do not perform uploads or downloads and that you do not run any other heavy resource consuming applications. Note that if your computer is encumbered with any of these factors (or especially if more than one...) that upon initially loading a webpage containing embedded videos, it may take a few seconds for the video picture images to appear on the webpage (in which case you may initially see “white space” until they do appear, and then the video image frames may be black for another second or two). If several of these factors are present at the same time (especially if you do uploads or downloads while viewing) you may encounter a situation where a video will stop and start erratically while playing. Also, if all or some of the videos do not appear on the webpage, refer to the "Browser Problems" item on the Posts Page

Additionally, we anticipate occasionally heavy traffic that may also contribute to slow response times. We need to upgrade to a dedicated webhost server to avoid this but may not be able to do so right away. So, if you encounter slow response times that you attribute to this website (and not your pc or connection), don't give up on us, just try back at another time and hopefully we will have managed to accomplish the upgrade or at least the traffic may be lighter at another time.

You may skip ahead or move backwards in the video while it is playing via two methods using the progress bar/button at the bottom of the video. One method is to postiion the cursor directly over the moving button and hold the left click button down to lock onto it, then move the cursor either forward or backward to reposition the video accordingly. The other method is to place the cursor behind or in front of the moving button and then do a single left click, resulting in the video reacting accordingly in small increments to each click (update: with our new video host these methods do not work well on the initial play, but do on a replay).

A tip on viewing multiple videos simultaneously. Since we usually post two or three videos of the same sunrise and sunset daily and also retain multiple takes in the archives, you might consider viewing more than one video at the same time if your monitor screen is large enough. This allows observing the slight changes in clouds and colors as the scenes progress in time, or even to speed up the process of comparing and evaluating the videos for potential downloading. Depending on your computer monitor screen size, how many toolbars you have selected as viewable, and whether or not you display the browser status bar and the OS taskbar, you should be able to see at least two videos and likely part of or even most of a third video at the same time. Note that if only part of a video is shown, you can squeeze it in by pressing and holding down the control key (labeled ‘Ctrl’ in lower left hand corner of a keyboard) and then pressing the minus key (usually in the upper right hand corner of a keyboard), reducing the size of the page content in the window of your browser — continue to depress the minus key repeatedly until the videos are reduced to the size such that they fit to your liking (to reverse the reduction, press the plus key instead of the minus key). If you are going through the archives to find videos to download, you could expedite the viewing process even more by starting two or three videos, scrolling down and starting two or three more videos, then scrolling back and forth observing various segments of all the playing videos. Remember, it is not necessary to click directly on the play button, left-clicking anywhere on the video image picture will more readily start a video playing. A potential disadvantage to playing multiple videos would be that the audio of all playing videos will be blended together.

Full Screen Viewing, Downloading Videos and using them in a Screensaver

A full screen viewing option is available via the clickable button to the left of the volume control in the lower right hand corner of the video image frame.

Just to the left of the full screen selection button is the download button. Clicking on that will allow you to download the video to your PC -- click on the "Screensaver" tab for suggestions on how you might use the videos.

A point to consider:  whereas the full screen view provides a larger image, there are currently drawbacks to that option.  First of all, some resolution is lost through the video webhost that we use as a repository for the videos, sometimes resulting in grainy or blurred visual effects. Note that the end result quality of the downloaded videos will be considerably better than what you experience in viewing the embedded videos via this website, particularly in full screen mode. This is due to several factors, but is primarily a shortcoming of video webhosts. Just remember that when viewing the videos, if you detect grainy or blurry segments, "jerky" stop/start motion, and particularly little squares, the downloaded video will always be significantly better and usually will not exhibit these tendancies at all. However, we admit that our low-end video camera does not have the pixel power to provide total clarity in full screen mode in some lighting and movement conditions and might produce similar visual shortcomings in low light or fast movement conditions. If you could contribute toward our upgrading to a high definition video camera in the interest of vastly improving the quality of the videos, just click on "Donate".

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If you have questions, suggestions, or requests you may either send us an email at jeb@lifesacoast.com or leave a comment at the bottom of this webpage.

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If you are interested in obtaining information on establishing a site like this, click on this link to our Google Knol documenting how we went about it.

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