Controlling Individual Video Streams

You can control your Video Streams individually by clicking anywhere on the seek bar within the Video Stream itself.

Figure: Individual Video Stream Control

The Observer Media Player Seek bar is unlike any seek bar you see in other streaming video applications. The Observer Media Player video feeds do not have a finite end to the video stream like other internet based video streams. Therefore, we cannot count down to the end of currently playing video. Instead the end user can configure the seek bar duration time span displayed on screen. Using the “+” & “-” magnifying glass icon in the lower right hand corner of the Observer Media Player (see the red box, above). You can define the seek bar time span to be anywhere from 1 minute to 10 hours in length in predefined increments. This duration applies to all open streams.

By hovering over the Observer Media Player Seek bar, you can immediately see the time down to the millisecond you wish to navigate to within that time span. Once you click anywhere on the seek bar, the video stream will instantly begin to stream video from that point in time. To return to the most recent content, simply click the live button and all open video streams will begin to stream live content again. Each open window can be individually controlled in the same manner.

Note that in this context “live” means “real time to the Observer.” The Observers ingests live video, transcodes it, stores it, and streams it out to you as an end user. This process takes from 6-8 seconds. Thus, the “live” feed will be about 8 seconds behind real time.

Border Color Identification:

Green Border

There are two visual ways to know you are “live mode.” First, Observer Media Player always surrounds a live Video Stream with a thin green border. Anytime you press the “Live” button on the Media Player bar, all open video streams will begin streaming live video and the green border will appear around all open video streams.

The green border disappears when the stream is not in near real time.

Figure: Video Stream Border Colors

Time Identification

The second method is comparing the time displayed on the video stream to the current time on your PC/laptop. Typically, there will be a difference in these two displays, depending upon whether your PC regularly synchronizes with an NTP server.