After several weeks of searching we found a suitable player for our video tutorials which should be more compatible as the old one and as well causes less trouble. The reason why we decided to change the player were many; users had problems with the player and in certain cases they couldn’t play the tutorials, the player hardly supported streaming and many more. So as you can see it was time for a change and we really hope that it’s a change to something better. Also we use from now a streaming server for playing the videos instead of progressive download which we had before. This has several advantages and the most noticeable is the capability of seeking the video. This basically means that you don’t have to wait until the video is buffered to seek the video but you can jump to any part instantly. This also means that you download only what you watch and nothing more.
Stuff
Upon some requests from our users we decided to implement a donation option using PayPal on 3D-Sphere. You can access the donate form from the right menu at any location of 3D-Sphere except the main page. The donation is absolutely voluntarilyand the user which will donate would not get any advantages from this. The donations will be used for running 3D-Sphere and improving it through components and stuff which are not open. Source or free. In this moment we want to establish a VPS allowing us stream our tutorials using RTMP protocols instead of progressive download and so allow also pseudo streaming which would mean the seeking options on all videos.
Like everyone we also need some rest and in hot and summer months more than before, so starting this day we have two weeks summer holidays at 3D-Sphere! During this time would be the support, news and forum online and under administrator maintenance, but we would not release any tutorial (we really need some rest from endless hours by computers J). Moreover we will use this time for developing and bug fixing on 3D-Sphere. One thing we would really like to change is our newsletter design and the appearance of. Even that this task is not so difficult, so far we couldn’t find any time to do so.
Publishing new tutorials is one of the main purposes of 3D-Sphere and we try to keep some periodicity and time range between publishing new tutorials. For sure you noticed that most portals which publish tutorials are publishing them part by part and no matter if the tutorial is long or shorts it’s always published like this. We never liked this way and also we can understand that waiting for every single part can be frustrating and so we publish tutorials as a whole and not part by part. However, sometimes we decide to do a bit more difficult and more time consuming tutorials and as a result are tutorials with multiple parts and length of more than 10 hours (for example: Fallout laser rifle).
Endless dilemma for a lot of webmasters and owners of any portal which offers tutorials related to 2D or 3D computer graphic. By starting 3D-Sphere we had this dilemma too and we had to decide which way we should go, not only to satisfy our users but also to keep in with the way how websites and related technologies are advancing. The main difference between this two presenting is obviously. The first way is presenting the idea or tutorial using a video and describing the workflow by capturing the moves and the other one is using text and pictures to show and describe the progress. Here we have to distinguish if it’s a tutorial, “making ff” or a guide with which you want to describe some Tips&Tricks.