Dolphin is great, love it!
Only pain in the arse though is when it comes to VIDEO!!!
IVe tried a number of mods, external embeds and other services to try to set it up to play a smooth videos service but so far, nothing has been satisfactory.
Problems...
Dolphins own video system for native uploaded videos is terrible. Very slow performance, no ability to skip through the video unless its fully rendered first...
Then if you embed from youtube in order to utilise their flv seeking ability (skipping without rendering) you get the 'click the video twice and end up on youtube' catch. Plus the big YT logo plastered on your video.
Not good if you have a paid site. Looks like your users could just goto youtube to get your content for free..
VIMEO has a great premium player that has all the features needed, only its for free sites only! You could try to get round this by not telling them about your paying membership, by may end up with all your video uploads to their site being cancelled once they catch up with you.
Ive tried flash video players hosted on my own dedicated server, but again, none have the hotseeking feature that viewers need if your video is more than 3 mins long...
The only other option is to pay again for a white player version such as dailymotions embed player. Then you get to double your site costs paying for another 'embed' server, on top of your own server costs...
The only mods Ive found on unity dont quite do it either. They either dont allow you to embed videos from their flash players elswhere on your site, or they end up re-directing you to the 'host' site they are embedding from again...
Its a real pain as all my Dolphin sites feature video as a key element. After all, 100% of your site members will end up looking at the screen... therefore surely video should be right at the top of the list of things to do well on a site??
for me, it doesnt matter how fast your server is, or how sleek your site runs, if the video still look cheap (embeds) or runs like a dead dog on your site, then your whole effort is in vain.
Boonex - PLEASE fix the video module so I can host my own videos and they work well??? Otherwise I have to spend endless more days / months crawling the web to find another service to plug into my site... that or pay again for another video host...
why is it so difficult????
