Artreid said:
That Flash content adjusts the resolution automatically based on the
available bandwidth. That's not just your bandwidth with your ISP
(which will fluctuate depending on how much your family and neighbors
flood that segment of your ISP's network) but also depends on the
throughput of each node in the route between your host and theirs. The
Flash Player apparently can change the resolution to match the bandwidth
its sees for the delivered content. Hover your mouse cursor over the
video quality slider and notice what the popup message tells you.
When I played that video, the "Video Quality" slider is not something I
can alter. There is no resolution option to pick lower or higher
quality display. It's automatic. That means if you were on dial-up or
slow broadband or your broadband connection or route to their server was
conjested that Flash Player will reduce resolution. There are multiple
streams for that "video". Some play at 1-bar quality, some played at
3-bar quality, and the game played at 2-bar quality although sometimes
it went to 3-bar quality.
That is to ensure the video continues to play without interruptions
(jerkiness, pauses, long halts, hangs). By automatically adjusting the
resolution based on available bandwidth, they eliminate the problems
noted at:
http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/poor-video-quality-flash-player.html
Other streaming media players do the same thing so Adobe is just
catching up witn "convenience" features available in other players. For
example, read:
http://flowplayer.org/plugins/streaming/bwcheck.html
You can use the 4-arrow toolbar button to zoom the video to fullscreen
but that won't affect the resolution. I was at the 2-bar video quality
setting (they won't tell me what is the resolution) and it stayed there
when I zoomed the video to fullscreen.
The higher your current *effective* bandwidth the higher the video
quality that the player will detect and tell the server to deliver.
