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Tardigrade videos on our website - permanent frustration guaranteed?

From time to time we do look at our user statistics. Well, the figures are still not quite at par with those of famous internet influencers like e.g. iJustine or Casey Neistat ;-) but besides a general tendency is becoming apparent: text is much less attractive than images and images are clearly less attractive than videos. As we do have tons of tardigrade video material one should think that we were on the winners' side due to this development? Yes - and no.

Let's try a short flashback: according to the Wikipedia the World Wide Web started in 1991. It took some time until everybody understood those strange "www"-terms in the public media and the tv commercials. And in the very beginning the Web was mostly a text-only experience. Images took their time to display and video was a kind of masochistic adventure.

The first ultra-short, almost ridiculously short and tiny video on our website appeared ca. 10 years later, in the beginning of the 21st century. At this time we had a quite dominant internet browser called Netscape, almost forgotten today. The first Microsoft "Internet Explorer" followed a little bit later, thus forming a "binary" video syntax world: videos could be either Netscape or Explorer friendly. Of course our website syntax was adapted to this dual browser world by providing a dedicated html video syntax, individually taking care of Netscape and the Explorer - ignoring and thus neglecting other systems and future developments. Furthermore there were only very few video clip formats existing, with *.avi dominating. But how on earth should one predict or prepare for the technical developments of the years to come?

Well, we all know what followed: the Firefox browser, Safari, Opera, Chrome and tons of new video compression formats like e g. MPEG-4. As a consequence we were constantly struggling to adjust our website code to the new developments. In parallel we received lots of mails from our (friendly and patient) readers stating that the video xx was not running properly on their system yy.

Though the videos in principle could still be found and watched by interested people, e.g. by Richard Hammond who used one of them for his BBC "Invisible Worlds" production, the situation was far from ideal. New hardware-driven developents complicated the situation: many people began using smartphones, iPhones, Android systems, tablets, smartwatches and so on. As a consequence about 2015 virtually none of our videos was usable on any system platform!

But now we are coming up with a solution: the following video clip should be viewable on most system platforms, as well as our iconic "Sweets" video. So do not hesitate to show it to bus drivers, friends, police men etc., i.e. everbody who must be convinced that tardigrades are actually existing!

Well, okay, if this very video still shouldn't run on your system do not hesitate to tell us. Of course this would be bad news but we will try to make the best out of it and work on readjustments. We are used to it. But please don't expect quick solutions ...


mp4 to ogg by EasyHtml5Video.com v3.5

Video clip: a Florarctus sp. marine tardigrade from the island of Krapanj in Croatia, as seen under a stereo (dissecting) microscope. It is obvious that most of this individuum is quite transparent. On the other hand the almost perfect camouflage is being ruined by any food or food remains in the stomach-intestine area. Body length ca. 2 mm.



© Text, images and video clips by  Martin Mach  (webmaster@baertierchen.de).
Water Bear web base is a licensed and revised version of the German language monthly magazine  Bärtierchen-Journal . Style and grammar amendments by native speakers are warmly welcomed.


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