Brian2Brian

Obscure Windows Media Player icons

So the icon for buffering is a rising or setting sun, and the icon for playing is a raincloud with a bolt of lightning? This seems to be a classic case of an icon adding no value. And these are really ugly icons, so they don't even count as eye candy.

I suppose streaming video from the U.S. to Singapore is stressing Media Player. Other things that drive me nuts:

• It doesn't seem to adjust automatically to network congestion. It seems to think it's OK to play half a second of video, then go off and buffer for 30 seconds, then play another half second, and never cut the video or reduce the quality.
• When the player is embedded in a web page, I can't manually set it to use lower quality, either.
• The video gets out of sync with the audio all the time.
• It resets the volume at the beginning of every clip. Specifically, when the clip starts playing. So if you adjust the volume while it is buffering, you lose the setting.
• When the network is too congested for streaming to be reasonable, I can't download a clip and play it in full from my hard disk.
• If I restart a clip, I have to watch the whole thing from the beginning, including any ads. I don't see how it helps advertisers for people to see their ads at times when they are extremely frustrated. Who wants to be associated with technical failure? Obviously, nobody thought through the consequences of the requirement that "it must be impossible to skip the ads."

posted by Brian @ 3/25/2005 09:46:00 AM