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Comment by teh_klev | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather I it didn't auto-play and let me choose whether I want a page to swamp my bandwidth and CPU. Even over an 8Mb/s ADSL connection on a quad core Xeon workstation with 12GB or RAM and fairly decent video card this page is one of the worst behaved I've encountered in a while.

Sadly I won't be reading any of the content because even after five minutes it's killing my browser. To the spark.io blogging team, please don't assume unlimited wads of broadband. Let the reader decide whether they want to play your videos, and you know, I can only watch one video at a time on that page, so why start them all playing at once? This is no better etiquette than CNN or MSNBC or an adware farm where they start playing videos at you upon arrival. It's very rude.

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Indeed; autoplay=true is stupid, but on the other hand, it's quite remarkable how it manage to bring my desktop PC to its knees.

Maybe using whatever https://mediacru.sh/ returns instead will help.

I really liked the effect, but took my headphones off to hear my MBP preparing for takeoff.

mediacru.sh returns MP4 videos, though...

You can easily embed MediaCrush videos on your site. I'm one of the devs on MediaCrush, I can answer questions if need be. It brings in webm, mp4, and ogv, but we've fine tuned the encoding more than most people would think to, and we have the video player UI in place if don't want to autoplay.

https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/10/31/Add-media-hosting-to-you...

Bluekitten, you are hellbanned for no apparent reason as of 21 days ago.

Why do people get hellbanned for?

This is the second time she's been hellbanned too.

For no real reason either time. I'm not sure what's going there.

Bluekitten is just the 100th or so reincarnation of recoiledsnake, which is as far as we can tell a Microsoft astroturfing campaign. Lately their sockpuppets are often female, to give people the impression we're banning women when we ban them.

Are there many accounts like that on HN?

This person or group has created lots of accounts, but there are no others like them that we know of.

I'm on ADSL with a low-end Core i5, 4GB RAM and integrated graphics, and didn't notice any slowdown at all.

Same

Did your cpu usage spike?

I also have an i5, and my Firefox was only using about half of one CPU, but stuttering like crazy. The UI froze up constantly and would barely scroll. FF 29.0a1 (2014-01-16) on Win7.

Edit: This is with crummy AMD FirePro 2270 graphics. Chrome 34.0.1789.0 canary was very smooth on the same box!

Yeah, it doesn't seem to be memory- or CPU-limited. My browser hard-locks for half a minute, but most major usage stats don't move.

I'm running Windows 8.1 on an i5 with Chrome and didn't notice any slowdown (nor fan speedup, or any of the usual issues sudden resource drains tend to cause) at all either. Looking at task manager shows Chrome is only using 13% of the CPU while I'm actively viewing that page.

I'm sure YMMV depending upon OS, browser, underlying installed codecs handling the video (and their associated gpu acceleration or lack thereof), etc.

I'd have to agree. It's not the bandwidth that was the issue though. All those videos loading and playing at once crushed my poor browser (Waterfox 24) until I was able to slowly pause them one by one. This does, however, work mostly smooth on my version of Chrome (32).

I'm on a university fiber network using my beefy workstation and this page is killing my Firefox

Same. it was insanely stressful for firefox. But this was a pretty good use of videos. if it could be more memory efficient..

It wouldn't have the same effect without auto-play. This is essentially a smarter GIF. Looks like the CPU suffers from all the videos playing simultaneously, maybe pausing videos as soon as they go off-screen could solve that (while browsers don't get to optimize this).

Firefox 26 with a shit-ton of privacy-related plugins on a budget $350 desktop, no slow-down at all.

This could be a useful chrome/firefox plugin. If you run this in your browser console, all that video will stop:

$('video').each(function() { this.pause(); })

Windows XP SP3 - Chrome 31.0.1650.63 - Core 2 Duo - 2GB Ram and no problems.

Now i'm thinking about upgrading and all that... :P

Performance issues are resolved, now the site only plays the videos that are on-screen.

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