Issue with video quality
First of all - we are loving ModelCentro. Amazing, amazing job with almost everything - upload interface (resumable uploads!), blogs, messaging interface... so much time saved compared to building a site from scratch with wordpress. Kudos! 
What we are seeing after a few months here however is that some members are not satisfied with the video quality on the site. It seems the videos we upload in 1080p are re-encoded into a different version which is still technically 1080p but is half the size (in mb), resulting in a substantial loss of quality. And they are noticing...
So our members, being amazing, are going to the other places where we sell our videos, and buying them there as well. More revenue for us, sure, but we'd love our ModelCentro members to have access to the best quality possible!
Any plans on fixing this in the future?
Comments
Hi there Bruce and Morgan and thanks for the awesome feedback.
We do compress the video to a format that is optimal for viewing online. Across the world, Internet speeds are different. We even had a user from somewhere in South America who couldn't view 240p about a year ago - simply because the video was too large for the bandwidth channel that was available where he lived. Brought tears to my eyes since he really did want to subscribe to the models' site for a long time.
That being said, naturally there are those with fast Internet for whom it won't even be an option opening any format other than 4K. We researched and chose the quality that caters to the majority of users. I will discuss whether we can change encoding standards but I can not promise that particular changes can be made soon, so I won't lie to you about that
Thanks for the answer Natalie!
So true, catering to the needs of people with lower bandwidth is very important! But that is something you already do well. It's great that lower resolution videos (240p 480p etc) are automatically generated from the uploaded video
What is less great is that a video uploaded in 1080p is also re-encoded into a slightly blurrier version of itself, still at 1080p. Perhaps uploaded videos could be left alone (not re-encoded) if they are already at one of your target resolutions?
I realize this post probably won't trigger a full re-engineering of your backend encoding pipeline
But I just thought I should mention. Users are noticing, and they are going elsewhere.
Noticed the same, i downloaded a video of mine to have the watermark to upload it to my PH and yeah the quality did change alot
@Bruce and Morgan, thank you for bringing it up. I will make sure to go over the topic in detail during a planning meeting and see what can be done about it.