Dropbox Video Previews Consistently Broken

[Nettles]

No matter what I do on desktop browser or phone or ipad app, Dropbox provides video previews which constantly freeze frames, stutter and have terrible bitrate or artifacting problems.

This is not even to mention the fact the max preview resolution is still limited to 720p (which is very low compared to the standards of other storage providers)

When I send clients an h264 video file to preview it's not uncommon for me to receive feedback that there are errors in my videos that turn out to be dropbox preview issues. It's not always possible or desirable for clients to download initial drafts of videos just to give basic feedback and this is frustrating on many levels. I've had to resort to uploading high-quality previews elsewhere to avoid this.

The files I'm using are very standard 10-15mbps h.264 files and I don't understand why this is happening given the wide and well implemented support for this elsewhere?

Is there anything I can do to remedy this or am I stuck with it until Dropbox upgrades their transcoding / player functionality?

Thanks all

[lukeyo]

Hey, sorry about the frustration.

Not sure if this helps, but what I do now (since DB Transfer came out) is simply transfer all video files to clients. I get notified when they download, I can set expiry dates, passwords etc. You need a paid account to send files over 100MB, but it works great and I never share links to videos anymore.

Luke

[Michael H.160]

Right there with ya man. DB will tell you that it's because of slow internet connection. I have a super-fast gigabit connection and the default quality for everything, even a 4mb .mp4 is set to low. I use Dropbox to send video files to clients and some of them are unaware of Dropbox's major lack of concern for quality playback.

The number of times I've had to say, "Oh did you try to play that in Dropbox? Don't do that! Their viewer is garbage. Download it first" And then I wonder why I'm spending $700/yr for a business plan. I don't want to also makes a Youtube, Vimeo, Wipster, Frame.io link. I want to send one usable file and it to play the way videos made in this decade play. 

My clients simply click on the link I give them and assume that it is I who set their video quality to absolute garbage. 

I have no idea DB can't set that default player to the highest resolution, but it has nothing to do with internet connection.

MH

[Aaronius]

I've had this exact problem for ages.  My friend always sends me 30 second clips of him playing video games and for the first 20 seconds it is digital garbage and 180x100 resolution.

  I sometimes send videos to clients and some of them are stressed out by "having to download the video first" or ask my why my video quality is absolute bottom-of-the-barrel trash and frankly its embarrassing.

My wife has made a video interview and now I am looking for a way to send the interviewer a link without having to instruct them on how to make it not be completely worthless to view, which is to me completely unacceptable.  The crazy thing is that it doesn't take more data to download it than to stream it, and the streaming is just broken and pointless.  

I have recently started to do commercial inspections and I cannot risk such a bad setup ruining my instructions to people offering large contracts.   I will not be using the paid Dropbox service for this purpose, which is unfortunate because it's otherwise excellent and very handy.

 If I could send a link that is download only that would be OK, but I can't seem to figure that out.  Does anyone know how or if it's possible? 

[Rich]

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@Aaronius wrote:
If I could send a link that is download only that would be OK, but I can't seem to figure that out.  Does anyone know how or if it's possible? 

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Create a shared link like normal, and change the ?dl=0 to ?dl=1.

• https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/force-download