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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

Not to nitpick... ok actually to nitpick, sorry. Your page bugged my to run a media player, which when allowed, changed to a background that was hard for me to read over and then sat there "buffering" interminably.

After 10 minutes it had reached 15%. What happens at 100%?

Edit: Ah. It finally got moving. It was coffee pouring. As the background. I guess if I didn't have my browser set so I have to approve plugins and it wasn't being HN'd to slowness so it started right up, that would have been kind of cool. As you were then.

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Yeah. I mean he's just using a regular ol' <video> tag. So you would presumably have that same issue with any site using HTML5 media tags.

Or at least any site with a <video> tag. It will be nice once the standard become ubiquitous. Until then <video> causes decidedly non-deterministic things to happen on the client.

I'd still like the ability to approve/disapprove a site that's about to play a 115meg video file as a background!

If your browser supports WebM, that version of the file is only 6.5MB. I include the MP4 as a backup.

Would it be feasible to fall back to an animated gif, or even just a static image? It took so long to load that I was done reading the page, and was looking at the fine print when it started playing, and that was a little bit jarring. Moreover, the placeholder image you had already looked really good.

(The video _was_ pretty cool, though.)

I just added a static image fallback instead of the brown background I had before. Keeps more in line with the intended look.

Ah, so there was supposed to be a video?

In Firefox 26 (Linux x64), a cup of coffee briefly flashes up in the background then disappears. I was confused by the "footage from Beachfront B-Roll" notice at the bottom of the page.

I thought the same thing. I mostly saw the stuttering buffer.

Is the effect really worth the risk of poor UX? Seems a nice background image would be effective enough.

(I also realize this is nitpicky, but still worth mentioning. Maybe the OP didn't realize some would have a poor UX.)

It doesn't help the MP4 is 115 MB, maybe compress that

Heh, I just saw a brown background, no video at all here on Mac/Chrome.

OP here. The background video is supposed to get pulled if it doesn't start playing right away (which is what happens in browsers that don't allow autoplay, like iOS. Not sure why that feature detection didn't work in your case.

It's definitely intended as a "background" - not supposed to detract from the site if it doesn't work.

Isn't the New Web great?

Hmm, it doesn't seem to work in Safari 7, but does in Chrome. Didn't think anything of it (it was just a orange background in Safari) before you asked. But, yeah, a coffee pouring.

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