Ugh! One day I have access to MR video plus, next day I don’t! Even called Kalmbach and thought I had it straightened out.
Do we get access to MR video plus with our MR magazine subscription? Kalmbach said yes and I had access after they straightened it out. Now I don’t. I have not paid the 45 bucks for MR video plus subscription thinking it would be included in the subscription.
All the videos on MR video plus are choppy and I don’t feel it’s worth paying for since playback quality is so poor. It looks like the moving trains are stuttering. Videos on Youtube play just fine.
As maxman stated, the MR Video Plus series is an additional cost and is not covered under or part of your regular magazine subscription. Your magazine subscription only gives you access to the MREXTRA content.
Your choppy streaming probably has more to do with your computer and/or your internet plan than with the MR videos. A number of their videos are HD (high definition), which have a resolution of 720p or greater. So, if your interent connection speed is 3Mbps or < then, most likely, that’s where your bottleneck is.
The other issue could be that you don’t have the adequate amount of RAM in your computer for buffering. 4GB is pretty much a minimum these days and 8GB (and greater) is preferable.
If upgrading your internet plan and/or computer RAM is not an option then what you can do to alleviate the issue is to let the video buffer (pause the video) for a few minutes before watching it.
It’s not my internet, 50 meg down, so I thought it was my laptop but it does it on my top of line desktop too. Quad core, 32 megs of memory, SSD drive, high end video card.
It’s not real noticable until I watch a train moving and the audio never cuts out.
I tried other browsers and it still does it. Any other website, train videos are smooth. Youtube and others. I figured it’s the website.
Pausing the video doesn’t help it either.
Something I will have to live with, I guess.
Thanks for the info on MRVP. I didn’t think it was part of the subscription. I had a newby on the phone from Kalmbach.
Maybe Steve Otte will weigh in on this but there ARE free videos for MR subscribers, and then there are videos which are sometimes free for everybody but more often, subscription to VideoPlus only. You can get both videos, I think, on VideoPlus so it might be that just by chance you were zeroing in the free for MR subscriber videos (or were visiting the site on the free for everybody weekends) and then hit the wall with a VideoPlus subscriber-only video.
I regard a VideoPlus subscription as worth what I pay for it. I do from time to time notice some jerky qualities or frame freezes while the sound keeps moving forward, but I have that same problem with videos on major league baseball’s sites so I suspect it is my computer or wireless system. I see jerkiness in some YouTube train and model train videos.
I don’t think the customer service people are actually Kalmbach employees sitting in Waukesha, as they once were. I think they are subcontracted out and likely serve many accounts. They are unfailingly cheerful and polite in my experience, but it may well be that some institutional knowledge base was lost when Kalmbach out-sourced things, or at least that is my hunch.
I even notice that now I am to send my Trains magazine renewal to an address in Tampa FL so that has been outsourced too. It is an “official” renewal not one of those fly by night outfits they warn you about. But when nothing goes to Kalmbach itself it makes separating the sheep from the goats that much more challenging.
Okay to rescind my orginal comment on this thread.
I paid for the MR Video plus subscription for a year. I find myself watching more and more videos so I thought it must be time.
Playback is much better with a paid subscription. I don’t know if that makes a difference but I didn’t see any stutter after subscribing. Kudos to MRVP!
Now, since it it so hot outside, time to watch some videos!