My responses below:

a) You actually do see the # of comments still; it's just over on the right side now.

b) Hmm. All videos should have thumbnails, even if it's just the logo of the video host or a sifter icon. Can you give me a link to a video that doesn't have any image at all? If such a thing exists (other than the few seconds after submission that it takes for the thumbnail to get generated) something might need to be fixed, but it really shouldn't be happening.


In reply to this comment by srd:
Ah, great! Thank you!

Two minor points that I think are valid:
a) You don't see the number of comments in the overview anymore (and there are a lot of videos where I just read the comments and don't watch the video, so this number is of interest)
b) Videos without thumbnails can't be run inline in the page listing, because there's nothing to click on.

In reply to this comment by lucky760:
FYI: http://www.videosift.com/talk/VideoSift-4-0-Launch#comment-818276

In reply to this comment by srd:
As much as I hate to be a party pooper, I'm going to dissent and say that I'm not as much in awe about the new UI as the rest of the sifters. Not very intuitive, but very busy. Things sliding in and out, shifting the contents up and down, icons appearing and disappearing... it's like someone discovered scriptaculous and just went crazy with the effects.

I appreciate that whoever did this did it with the best intention, and a lot of work went into this, but being slidey and cool doesn't trump usability. (It does gyre and gimble in the wabe. And mimsy were the borogoves...)

My big wish for 4.1: Add an optional "static" layout, minimizing javascript effects.

And please move the "login" link out of the "New user?" menu. I was looking for over two minutes for that darn login link.

FYI: http://www.videosift.com/talk/VideoSift-4-0-Launch#comment-818276

In reply to this comment by srd:
As much as I hate to be a party pooper, I'm going to dissent and say that I'm not as much in awe about the new UI as the rest of the sifters. Not very intuitive, but very busy. Things sliding in and out, shifting the contents up and down, icons appearing and disappearing... it's like someone discovered scriptaculous and just went crazy with the effects.

I appreciate that whoever did this did it with the best intention, and a lot of work went into this, but being slidey and cool doesn't trump usability. (It does gyre and gimble in the wabe. And mimsy were the borogoves...)

My big wish for 4.1: Add an optional "static" layout, minimizing javascript effects.

And please move the "login" link out of the "New user?" menu. I was looking for over two minutes for that darn login link.

Well the stutter problem came back a little. It only happens on certain video hosts too like YouTube and Metacafe. Vimeo and most others are fine. I did more research on the issue and learned that nVidia's drivers are problematic on a lot of Linux distributions. A bunch of Linux geeks even made an online petition begging nVidia to make their Linux drivers open source so that they could make them work better. Oh well.

I'm also switching my ISP so I can have a faster connection. It will be going from from 1.5 Mbps to 8.0 Mbps. I'm hoping that might help, because I've noticed that the longer it takes the video to buffer, the greater the chance the video will stutter or just plain stop. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Otherwise everything else is fine. It's easier to use than I initially thought it would be, and it only seems to be getting easier. Here's to brave middle-aged men.

Thanks for checking. Hope everything is going well for you.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Hey, just wanted to check back on how things are going with your adventures in linux land. Everything running smoothely I hope.

Sadly no, the biggest version I could find was 200x300ish.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Wow, thats one kickass avatar. Got it in a higher resolution? I'd love to use it as my desktop background.

You can report them to Dag or myself. Or just use the contact form and select "bug report" as the subject and we'll both be contacted.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Say, whom do I bugger with bug reports? You, dag or blankfist?

I have no real need for OpenOffice 3, so I guess I'll stick with Intrepid for now. I didn't do any separate Flash upgrade. I checked in Firefox, and it indicates that I have both Shockwave Flash 9.0 and Shockwave 10.0. Is that normal?

Hey, I really appreciate all the help. That's worth at least a few promotes in my book. Thanks.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Great! Too bad we don't know what caused it... If intrepid is running well enough for you, then I'd say stay there for a while. So far I've been mildly disappointed with Jaunty (new amarok version that can't talk to ipods, general ipod problems, less runtime for laptops, etc. Stable but less able.) Unless you need openoffice 3 to deal with ms office 2007 documents. But there are other ways to get office 3 into intrepid. Did you upgrade your flash player while you were at it?

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Good news: I don't have the stutter problem anymore. Videos now play smooth as silk. All I did was upgrade from 8.04 Hardy to 8.10 Intrepid. I should have done that sooner I guess. Do you think I should upgrade to 9.04 Jaunty? It's new, so maybe all the bugs haven't been worked out so I might have the stutter problem again. I'd rather stay with Intrepid if that's the case.

Good news: I don't have the stutter problem anymore. Videos now play smooth as silk. All I did was upgrade from 8.04 Hardy to 8.10 Intrepid. I should have done that sooner I guess. Do you think I should upgrade to 9.04 Jaunty? It's new, so maybe all the bugs haven't been worked out so I might have the stutter problem again. I'd rather stay with Intrepid if that's the case.

Jesus, you're killing me, teach. Can I get an extension on my paper?

In reply to this comment by srd:
Hmm, ok. No stutter with other apps means that the sound subsystem is basically ok, so it isn't a driver or a hardware issue.

Flash under Linux has always been treated a bit as a lead paint chip eating "special" relative by adobe, so things flash tend to run less smoothly anyway. Thing's I've observed:
Flash is a lot more CPU intensive under linux than under windows; they seem to have implemented especially the flash movie decoding and rendering rather inefficiently. But basic CPU speed shouldn't be a problem in your case, since you have a brand new dual core machine. My EEEBox croaks on HD videos

Flash movies aren't streamed from memory, they're first saved in /tmp, then played back from there once enough is buffered there. This means you have several things going on simultaneously: the flash stream coming in from the network, the flash stream being written to disk, the flash stream being read from disk and finally the decoding and rendering. The last part should be ok. Getting the flash via the network should be OK too, since I'm guessing you can tell the difference between stutter and repeated buffering pauses

So, what we have left is (barring other CPU tasks running that you didn't tell me about): the harddisk. This meshes somewhat with your observations that the problems get worse if lots of movement takes place: the bitrate of the video goes up and more data needs to be read from the disk and processed by the CPUs.

So things you could check (Homework Paintchipboy!): is there another harddisk intensive programm running (to verify my diagnosis: start up a big program like staroffice or the gimp when you're playing a video. Does stutter get worse?)? Is the partition your /tmp directory is on full? Is the harddisk being addressed in UDMA mode (sudo apt-get install hdparm; sudo hdparm /dev/sda - sorry this is keyboard work Fire up 'top' in a console. In the third row from the top you'll see a line of CPU stats. The %wa entry would be interesting while you're experiencing stutter. That's the time the CPU waits for requested data from a storage medium aka Wait Time. You can quit top by pressing 'q'.

I'm guessing your harddisk is basically ok and not damaged because you'd have tons of other problems then.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Sorry it took so long to get back to you - been kind of busy. Anyway I haven't noticed the problem with other apps. I've played other audio and video files, and they all seem to wotk fine. It's just Flash video that's the problem. It gets worse with with HD flash. If the images are relatively static there's no problem, but if there's a lot of motion then stuttering occurs.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Are you experiencing stutter with other apps? Playing mp3s for e.g.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you - been kind of busy. Anyway I haven't noticed the problem with other apps. I've played other audio and video files, and they all seem to wotk fine. It's just Flash video that's the problem. It gets worse with with HD flash. If the images are relatively static there's no problem, but if there's a lot of motion then stuttering occurs.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Are you experiencing stutter with other apps? Playing mp3s for e.g.

Hahaha. You sick pervert. I didn't even imagine that double meaning at all.

(If I had, I wouldn't have said they scare me. )

In reply to this comment by srd:
Why oh why must you tempt me so to make juvenile comments?

In reply to this comment by lucky760:
>> ^MarineGunrock:
There are bold cats and there are old cats....

...and there are bald cats. They scare me.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I've heard of it, but haven't tried it, thanks for the recommendation. The Gothic nature of Revelation Space always reminded me a bit of Dan Simmons books.

In reply to this comment by srd:
In reply to this comment by dag:

SRD: I like Revelation Space too - it's a weird but effective combination of gothic and space opera.

Do you know Neal Ashers "Polity" series? You might like it. Somewhat more blood and gore, but a well thought out universe and entertaining stories.

Right after I did that I was like, "Uh... oopsies." I'm glad you were amused!

In reply to this comment by srd:
In reply to this comment by Issykitty:
Don't know about you, but repeatedly adding his post into the *Islam channel seems outright racist to me.

Hilarious. I was considering faking the move with a space in between on that post until I saw this. Yes, I know it's infantile, but I just wanted to let you know that your mistake as brighted up someones day

Congratulations on reaching new heights on VideoSift. You have earned yourself 37 stars, earning you status of Silver Star member. You have been awarded 1 Power Point for achieving this level. Thanks for all your contributions.

I think the only groups I've ever tracked 'wholly' through their careers is the Beatles and Pink Floyd. Most of the rest I just take on a song by song (or album by album) basis..

In reply to this comment by srd:
Probably a better attitude than mine. I have a more holistic approach to bands.

In reply to this comment by NicoleBee:
No idea! I just have the one album and really cherry-picked the song I liked most. Don't care about the group themselves quite honestly. This is true for most of what I listen to.

No idea! I just have the one album and really cherry-picked the song I liked most. Don't care about the group themselves quite honestly. This is true for most of what I listen to.


In reply to this comment by srd:
Do you know their early works? Souls/Islands come to mind. That is truly horrible, even by germish standards. I never really paid them much attention after Alpha-Omega though, so maybe they actually took lessons.

In reply to this comment by NicoleBee:
I guess it really isn't what you say but how you say it.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Project Pitchfork, really? Wow. I've always found their tenuous grasp of english to be extremely cringe-worthy