Improving Your Guild Experience

If you’ve been a Wood Whisperer fan or Guild member for a while, you already know that I am not the type to wait for something to break before I fix it. I’m always looking for ways to improve the user experience on both our free site and the Guild. And since your primary reason for being here is the video content, I consider this to be a pretty significant upgrade!

We recently started testing out a completely new video player that includes a couple of nice features and improvements.

Loading Speed

The videos are now located on a very fast and intelligent media server. As a result, the video starts up almost instantly when you press play and if you want to skip around, the player adjusts very quickly. For folks on slower internet connections, the player will automatically adjust the video quality to suit your needs. And if you’re on a mobile device, you’ll find a significant performance boost there too. Life is too short to sit around waiting for videos to load!

Resumability

This is one of those features I didn’t know I needed until I saw it, and now I can’t live without it! Have you ever been interrupted while watching a Guild video? When you go back to watch it again, you have to spend a few minutes trying to find your place. Or maybe you accidentally hit the back button in your browser and completely lose your place. Well the new Resumability feature takes care of that. If you close out a video before it finishes, the player takes note of where you left off and asks if you’d like to resume or simply start at the beginning. Handy!

Chapters

Let’s face it, Guild videos are long. They are made that way for a reason but not everyone wants to sit through another full discussion of milling or wood selection. Furthermore, if you’re building along it can be tricky to find that one section of a video you need so you can complete a particular part of the project. As an answer to that, I have begun including chapter links to the right of each video. If you click one of these links, it takes you directly to that particular section of the video! And because the video performance is faster than ever, moving from chapter to chapter is quick and easy.

The Guild videos are meant to be a long-term resource that you can rely on for years to come as you progress through your woodworking experience. I want you to be able to come back to a project you saw years ago just so you can watch that one time I dressed up like an Amish guy. With the new video player, we are taking another step in that direction.

The Catch?

Well it can’t be ALL good news, right? For some folks running an Ad Blocker plugin, you might not be able to see the new Download button underneath the video player. So if you are looking to download the videos to your hard drive, you’ll have to turn off that ad blocker or add an exception for the Guild.

Also, the video player isn’t fully incorporated into all projects yet. We’re working on the back catalog as we speak. And because I didn’t always take chapter notes, not all videos will receive the chapter links right away. We hope to eventually include them in ALL Guild videos. Of course every video from here on out will include all new features.

Try it Out!

Want to give it a whirl? Here’s the video we just released today to folks subscribed to the Contemplation Bench project. If you’re not subscribed, enjoy this free sample.