Veoh: Horrifyingly Crappy



  • Has anyone used the video site Veoh?  Holy crap, what a pile of fail.  For starters, the Flash-based player and a lot of the AJAX on the site is horribly broken.  Trying to navigate using the AJAX-y links on the site might well result in being stuck with your only option being to navigate back to the last fully-loaded page you were on and trying again.  People, if you're going to use AJAX to dynamically replace crap, please make sure there is some kind of history entry created in the browser so I don't end up losing my place.

     

    The biggest problem, though, is the godawful premise: most of the video available via the web are only "previews".  To watch the full video, you must download a browser extension.  It's a harrowing reminder of how shitty Internet video was before YouTube.  Of course, you also have to register an account to make use of the extension.  I think the extension makes use of peer-to-peer file sharing to save Veoh some money on bandwidth.  Look, if YouTube can do us all the favor of being bought-out by a multi-billion dollar company that will end up footing the massive expense of running a popular video site that has no revenue source, then Veoh should be able to as well.  Maybe their business plan is to sell the massive database of personal info they harvested from stupid users (hint: none of the required info appears to be checked for any reason and the email address it not used for a confirmation code, so it's quite possible to sign up with false info).  Oh, it gets worse, though.  The "web player" is choppy and the controls are about as spazzy as most of the Flash-based video players out there.  What's more, there is absolutely no way to fast-forward to an undownloaded part of the video.  Instead, you must wait for the entire video to download in-order.  Great.

     

    One neat side-effect of the shitty browser plug-in is that it lets you download videos for later.  This is actually quite a nice feature and the videos are even in AVI format, which means you don't need a hideous custom "media player" to watch them (I'm looking at you, Miro and Vuze).  The download is peer-to-peer as well, which is fine if you are planning on saving the video to watch later, although I would prefer the downloads be provided as torrents instead of the proprietary Veoh format.  Mostly just so I wouldn't have to install the damn web player just to download a video.  Really, this thing is annoying.  It sits on the bottom Firefox status bar at all times and starts blinking spastically when it detects you are on a Veoh web page with a downloadable video.  The download manager itself seems fast with a clean, simple interface.  If you try to play a completed video from it, though, it will launch a custom page on the Veoh site that plays the video with the embedded web player.  I'm glad the downloaded files are AVI, but couldn't the download manager just launch my default media player instead of using some junky web-based player to watch locally-saved content?  Christ.

     

    Overall, about the only positive thing I can say about Veoh is that the downloaded videos idea is neat and the choice of AVI a solid one.  The need for a browser plugin is majorly atavistic and I do not care for having it visible at all times, which is why I plan to nuke it from orbit once my downloads have completed.



  • Last time I used it, I found some porn videos. Now it's locked to my country, thanks god...



  • And they offer great services to everyone around the world!

    Their services.

    (someone should let them know  that there are other countries besides the U.S. and Western Europe)



  • @rohypnol said:

    (someone should let them know  that there are other countries besides the U.S. and Western Europe)

    PROTIP: Western Europe isn't a "country".

     

    They were probably just trying to protect the citiziens of Romania.  God knows the panic it would cause if Romanians were shown moving photographs.  There would probably be accusations of witchcraft, mass donkey wrecks on the highways and entire cities of straw huts burned to the ground.



  •  I used Veoh back when Hulu was first in beta and they were stealing the feed.  Was the only way I could watch Hulu.

    Probably explains the US-only thing.  I assume Hulu blocks non-US people and Veoh decided it was easier to do the same, rather than to selectively block the stuff they stole from Hulu.



  •  On an entirely unrelated note, I'm surprised the word "atavistic" doesn't come up more around here.  It's a great word to describe much of what is posted here.



  • Never heard of Veoh so I decided to take a look.  The first thought that came to mind was "Looks a lot like You Tube". 



  •  @morbiuswilters said:

    Overall, about the only positive thing I can say about Veoh is that the downloaded videos idea is neat and the choice of AVI a solid one.

     

    Is there anything about this that Youtube + Vixy doesn't do better?  (If there's something better than Vixy, then by all means point it out; I was just asked to find something a couple months back, and Vixy was Good Enough.)

     



  • @emurphy said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Overall, about the only positive thing I can say about Veoh is that the downloaded videos idea is neat and the choice of AVI a solid one.
     

    Is there anything about this that Youtube + Vixy doesn't do better?  (If there's something better than Vixy, then by all means point it out; I was just asked to find something a couple months back, and Vixy was Good Enough.) 

    This doesn't appear to convert FLV to AVI but instead downloads an AVI original directly from Veoh.  This results in slightly better quality.  The videos I was watching on Veoh were definitely better quality than YouTube, although they didn't seem as good as 480p Hulu.  YMMV.


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