Hi all,
My page is currently here during the build: http://www.stormtempweb.com/vocalworkshop/about_dani/
You can see that I’ve got a youtube video there, using the ‘youtube stack’ by Maik Barz. My concern is that the still image from that video that you initially see on the page, it’s really low res. Is there any way that I can put a better jpg in its place and it will still work when you click on it?
I’m using Rapidweaver 6.3.4 and Stacks 3.
Any help much appreciated :-).
The bottom line answer is “yes, you can fix it”. How you fix it will depend on the tools you have at hand. I don’t know how the particular Barz stack work. It asks for a YouTube URL, but does it also ask you to put in a “poster” image? That’s what we are seeing. Lots of stacks don’t do that, they just use the poster image supplied by YouTube.
So if you can supply your own poster image then there are ways to probably get better quality. If it uses the image used by YouTube then you may be limited by the original/big size of the video when uploaded. If, for example, a video has a maximum width of 640, but the poster image developed is bigger then there will be degradation in the image quality. So one solution would be to make sure the width of the video on your web page does not exceed the biggest width size at YouTube.
Some services like Vimeo allow you to choose what frame will be your poster image. That’s another possibility is to choose a different poster.
Hi Gabrielle,
If you don’t have a stack that lets you select the “poster” image from youtube, another option might be to use Topbox (or similar lightbox) and have the still frame image of your choosing (via a screen capture or frame capture) in an image stack set to be the “trigger” stack for Topbox, which would open up the youtube video.
Topbox works very well for youtube or vimeo. But of course then the video is opening in a lightbox as opposed to just existing on the page in a youtube sack.
Also as Mathew said the quality of the screen capture will depend on the resolution of the original video uploaded to youtube or vimeo. The best quality available of the video on your page is 480p (which you can select in the youtube’s player “settings”), and while not hi-res, it doesn’t look too bad at the size of the youtube stack on your page. This way visitors who have to choose a lower res version on youtube because of slow internet speed will still see the still frame at the higher res.
Youtube allows you to change the ‘poster’ image under the edit button on your video page, look for ‘Custom Thumbnail’. There’s a maximum image size of 2Mb. Find a movie grab program (Frammer X works well), load your original movie file (the one you used to upload to YT), find a good frame and grab it as a jpg, adjust to 2Mb and then use ‘Custom Thumbnail’ on your YT page and change the thumbnail at YT.
Hi all,
thanks for getting back to me so quickly :-).
Mathew: No the stack doesn’t ask for a poster image unfortunately.
I think the video is quite low res so I might be restricted unless I reduce the size of the video, but it does lose impact that way, thanks for the info though.
Thang: Yes I could use top box but I’d rather keep it simple if possible :-).
DaveFos: I didn’t upload the video myself so I can’t get access to the youtube edit feature, but I will try and contact the user to see if I can nip in and do as you suggest.
Thanks again!