I am happy to announce that we now show video fullscreen when you play Phanfare slideshows. Fullscreen video is a popular feature request. We debated for a while whether to offer this feature because the video must be stretched and hence will be pixelated. But the consensus is that full screen video is more immersive and when you watch slideshows, you are often further from the screen and don’t mind some pixelation.

You can still watch video unstretched (non-fullscreen) by watching it within the album context versus the slideshow.

To review how video works at Phanfare, we keep multiple renditions of each video uploaded. We keep your original video (or a 4 megabit per second MPEG4 version) that you can download through the “download high quality” link on a page. We also keep three h.264 versions, the highest bit rate being 1.3 megabit/second. The lowest bit rate we encode in is 512 kilobits/second. And, we keep two Flash 7 compatible version for viewers who don’t yet have a version of Flash that supports h.264.

When a viewer first watches a Phanfare video, we measure their CPU speed and the bandwidth between them and us, and based on our measurements, we select a video that is appropriate for the situation. The goal is to give the viewer the highest possible bitrate that their computer can play without stuttering.

Hence, the degree of pixelation will depend on how high a bitrate video you are viewing. You can override our choice of video bitrate if you believe that a different version will work better for you. You do this in the right bottom corner of the video in album context. The slideshow respects this setting.

Our videos are not HD, but most users can’t support high enough download rates to show true HD video. Most videos shot with point and shoot still cameras are 640×480 (not HD) and we do support showing that format at original resolution and high quality.

So gather around the the biggest monitor you have this holiday season and enjoy our full screen slideshows with music and video.

As part of this release we also improved the downloadable version of the slideshow with full-screen slideshows. You can download a Phanfare slideshow and show it offline in all its glory, great for situations where you are not sure you will have a network connection when showing the slideshow. The downloadable slideshow for the Mac is now a universal binary, no longer running under Rosetta, and hence is much snappier on Intel-based Macs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 5:29 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.