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Thursday, 9 July 2020

3rd Virtual Headbang - 8th July, 2020 - Last night's issues

There must have been a dark star above last night as we were blighted by a series of problems for our 3rd virtual Headbang, viz:

  • Malcolm's router had been "fried" in the electrical storm a couple of weeks ago and, despite several promises, the replacement never arrived in time for him to join in. One down.
  • Jeb had major problems downloading the video files, despite several attempts to send him the files in smaller chunks. Eventually he resorted to phoning me to ask me to put them on a memory stick and, at 6:45 pm, he arrived at my house to pick it up and head back home to copy the files on to his PC before our 8 pm start. That's dedication.
  • Aidan sent me an email just before the start to say he was going to be late joining us. It transpired there was a problem with Liz's Mum (which turned out OK) but Aidan managed to join us for the second half of the evening.
  • After the Headbang started, Andy, then Steve, began to report issues with lack of sound on some of the videos. (Steve eventually resolved this by using another media player).
  • Colin couldn't play any of the videos in the last theme.
I'm happy to report that Dave, Rob, Phil and Gerry didn't have any problems!

What has been learned from all of this (if future Headbangs still have to be done remotely) is:
  • Dropbox doesn't seem to be able to cope with the size and number of files we used last night (over 3 Gb) if you only have the free version. This, I believe was the root of the problems Jeb and Colin faced. I now have a paid version so uploading all the files is easy enough for me, but downloading (or just playing) them can be a problem for some of the end users. Making the virtual Headbangs a little shorter may help.
  • As Steve demonstrated last night, having more than one media player available can eliminate any potential issues on playback. Steve downloaded VLC (which Dave also uses) last night - perhaps Andy could try this too?
Here's to better luck next time. Votes etc to follow.

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