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26 Jul 2007

YSlow is a wonderful Firebug plugin from Yahoo! that helps you optimize your web sites by analyzing them according to 13 rules for high performance web sites as written by the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team.

I just started playing with it on my site and one of the things it pointed out was that the default Viddler embed URL for the SWX screencast was redirecting to a different URL. Removing that redirection should speed things up according to Rule 11: Avoid Redirects and you should be able to apply this to all embedded Viddler videos.

Simply change the URL that is given to you by Viddler from the form

http://www.viddler.com/player/ad098fea/

to

http://www.viddler.com/flash/publisher.swf?key=ad098fea

and you'll remove the redirect and speed up the loading of the video.

I do hope that Viddler modifies the code that their Embed feature creates to use this direct URL and, also, to provide the option of embedding the video at its original size without your having to calculate it yourself.

Creative Commons LicenseThe A YSlow tip for speeding up Viddler embeds article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.

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A YSlow tip for speeding up Viddler embeds

3 Comments »

  1. Hi Aral –

    Thanks for the note. We are using the redirect (similar to youtube and others) because we push out new versions and want the newest version to update users cache.

    Would love to hear more of your thoughts on this as we are looking to make this player as versatile, light, and quick as possible.

    Rob

    Rob Sandie

  2. Aral,

    Thanks for pointing this out. Of course we use YSlow, and as you might have noticed – we implemented most of the advices on the site already.

    However it’s not an easy task with the player. To say the least – we serve player off a CDN. This means we HAVE to have this particular redirect to update stats & linkbacks. Otherwise the HTTP request for the player would go straight to an external service provider, leaving us in the void as to hard numbers.

    Please keep me informed if there’s anything else we (at Viddler) should know. No man is perfect, and we always learn.

    Thanks a lot,
    Axe

    Axe Master

  3. Thanks for this! Is there a way to remove the contextual ads from playing during a viddler video? Is there a piece of code that you add like showinfo=0 on youtube? Thanks so much

    Jeff