Had enough of embedded DPReview videos

[fluppeteer]

Okay, I'm sure this has been covered because this behaviour has been around for months, but it's now annoying me enough that I want to bump it.

Who on earth decided that automatically playing a silent video of an article I'd seen and chosen to ignore - or one I've already watched - was a good idea? It's annoying when ads do this, but I appreciate dpreview needs to make money somehow. But for your own internal videos?

On a phone it takes up valuable screen real estate (and potentially costs money). On my MacBook, I have a *lot* of windows open for work. There's a thing that if windows are updating, WindowServer burns through CPU. Which means if I open five dpreview articles that I mean to get back to reading later and they all try to play a video, my machine becomes less responsive, it sits with a CPU permanently pegged, and runs hot (it's actually made me turn my air con on); if I go anywhere with it the battery dies.

Please don't play videos unless you really need to, but for the love of all that's holy, please stop covering half the article I'm trying to read with a video for something I don't care about (and then reopen it if I close it). Or at least give us a setting to turn it off. It's not getting you any more hits.

 

[Mathew Anderson]

Okay, I'm sure this has been covered because this behaviour has been around for months, but it's now annoying me enough that I want to bump it.

Who on earth decided that automatically playing a silent video of an article I'd seen and chosen to ignore - or one I've already watched - was a good idea? It's annoying when ads do this, but I appreciate dpreview needs to make money somehow. But for your own internal videos?

On a phone it takes up valuable screen real estate (and potentially costs money). On my MacBook, I have a *lot* of windows open for work. There's a thing that if windows are updating, WindowServer burns through CPU. Which means if I open five dpreview articles that I mean to get back to reading later and they all try to play a video, my machine becomes less responsive, it sits with a CPU permanently pegged, and runs hot (it's actually made me turn my air con on); if I go anywhere with it the battery dies.

Please don't play videos unless you really need to, but for the love of all that's holy, please stop covering half the article I'm trying to read with a video for something I don't care about (and then reopen it if I close it). Or at least give us a setting to turn it off. It's not getting you any more hits.

Hi fluppeteer,

Apologies for them coming up too frequently! I'll let our team know; perhaps they can adjust the rate.

 

[fluppeteer]

Is there a way to opt out of them at all? Or at least guarantee they don't pop up if a page isn't being supervised? I have a *lot* of windows open (across five monitors), and finding the hidden one that's decided to start showing a video is annoying.

I appreciate you might want to encourage people to view other content, but I've been coming here since the 1990s, I'm pretty likely to notice anything I want to watch. I appreciate you'll be constrained with adverts, but this makes it worse. And it's annoying on mobile - a video running at the top of the screen while an advert runs at the bottom means the space for reading an article is limited, not to mention the videos being distracting...

Thanks for investigating, though.