Really bad performance for Udemy site / player

[Robin_Beddall]

Hey,
I’m currently working through the complete Unity course and I’m finding it very difficult to carry on. The performance in my web browser when trying to watch the videos is terrible. It’s super sluggish to navigate, the video will only play every 5 seconds or so. It’s sluggish to the point of being unusable.
The weird thing is this seems to happen totally randomly in both Firefox and chrome. sometimes i can watch a whole video and the browser won’t go above 2 % cpu… other times i can watch the exact same video and the browser is chugging at 25% cpu. The same for the Udemy site.
I don’t experience any problems with any other video streaming sites or web sites in general. Just Udemy. Is there currently a problem with these things? or does anyone have any idea what i could try to fix them?
I’m running win 10 , Firefox and chrome. Hardware acceleration disabled. ( i saw that somewhere as a solution … it hasn’t worked)
Any help would be greatly appreciated… it’s a great course… really want to get back on with it

cheers

[Michael_King]

I’ve been having similar trouble with Udemy, to the point where I have to close down my browser and reopen it to continue the lesson. It’s not just the video that stops to buffer, but the entire UI starts lagging and freezing up the browser.

It seems to have started when they revamped the Udemy site… I didn’t have any issues with it before that. I’m also running Win10 and Chrome. Other streaming sites and services work fine.

[Rob]

Hi @Robin_Beddall,

Thanks posting and I am sorry to hear you are experiencing difficulties with the Udemy site.

Udemy have their own support page which offers quite a few things to try, I’m not sure whether you have already seen this/tried these yet, so here’s the link;

Udemy Video Playback Issues

Let us know how you get on, hopefully one or more of these may help resolve the issues for you.

[Robin_Beddall]

Hey,

I have tried some of those solutions tho possibly not ALL of them. I will try them tonight.
As Michael_King has noted, the problem is with the entire UI. It will just grind my browser to a halt, even if i try and view a different page in a different tab. The Udemy page, even when not the active tab takes all the performance away.
After some initial hiccups I did manage to get quite a smooth run for an hour or so last night using Microsoft Edge.

cheers

[CoCopia]

For me it was using the Avast plugin, that was interrupting video playback, causing the streaming to pause. I presume, as it was doing it’s checks.

[Robin_Beddall]

I don’t use Avast,. but I did suspect that win 10 anti-malware could be the issue ( wouldn’t be the first time), though disabling that didn’t seem to have an immediate beneficial effect… though I did experience good performance later in the night and the anti-malware would of still been disabled then.
gonna have to test it again tonight.

cheers

[pauld]

I think sadly it is just Udemy. Having watched many many hours of videos in the old system with no issues whatsoever and with no chance of spec on my Mac - this “new and improved” interface is just appalling.

It does run hideous slow and sluggishly as the OP said and makes me want view the videos directly without the Udemy interface. The removal of the ability to mark videos and watched/unwatched is also highly frustrating and further adds to this.

It does seem to run slightly better in the app versions, and for me having a second screen (even in the form of an iPad mini) is a darn sight easier than flicking back and forth between Udemy and Unity - especially when it takes 5-10 seconds for the controls to appear when hovered over.

I vote we all put complaints in to customer support!

P

[ben]

Please do complain to support.

Note also that you can download content for offline viewing on iOS or Android using Udemy’s app.

[pauld]

Dear Ben,

“My” iPad is filled with my 3 year olds games and apps - not sure there’s room for hundreds of hours of your videos as well!

Seriously though, for me it’s not the playback or streaming speed - it’s the actual interface itself. It is the opposite of responsive and therefore frequently causes issues like exiting to menu etc. because of slow click recognition.

Complaint on its way tomorrow!

P

[ben]

Understood, you can download one video at a time, one section or the whole course

[pauld]

True!

Also (off topic I apologise) but this forum is really great - well-designed, user friendly, intuitive and seems to be building a real community, which I honestly didn’t expect away from Udemy - though they’ve only themselves to blame.

[ben]

Thank you, we’re trying.

[Robin_Beddall]

Hey,
I have recently been getting better results more frequently since disabling all the extensions in chrome.
It still sometimes runs very sluggishly but I feel there’s a definite improvement since I disabled them.
I think the main 2 culprits were the chromecast ext and AdBlock. not sure why the chromecast would affect it as it wasn’t being used at the time… but those were my findings… maybe coincidence?

I mailed support and they did offer some advice but it was mainly concerning the video playback, but as PaulD says… it’s more about the sluggishness of the interface making it unusable.

[ben]

I have un-marked this as solved, and reported it to Udemy to the highest power as I can.

[Robin_Beddall]

Hey,

Thanks… and kudos on a brilliant course :)… really enjoying it. will no doubt purchase more in the future…
if… you fix the UI

cheers

[ben]

I wish I had any control over the UI. As I say I’ve pointed Udemy to this thread, and hope they take it seriously. If any of you can include steps to reproduce that would be great.

[pauld]

Dear Udemy,

The steps to reproduce this are: access any Udemy video on any browser since you switched UI.

For me, I use Safari mainly, and whilst the video plays fine and clicking to start/stop is responsive the rest of the interface is not. The header and controls take between 5 and 10 seconds to appear when hovered over, with the progress bar taking the longest.

Clicking on the progress bar is very unreliable, as are most of the elements and the (again 5 second plus) delay means you often double click and undo your action or exit the video entirely.

This doesn’t seem to remember previous time point played to either, which I’m positive the previous version did and was most useful.

Thanks in advance for fixing this!

[ben]

This is the reply I had from Udemy, they are trying…

Hi Ben,

My name is Jessie and I am the Technical Escalations Lead here at Udemy. I’m sorry to hear that your students are encountering issues with the video playback of the Complete Unity course.

Please do know that we have an engineering team dedicated to monitoring video and site performance, and they are not seeing anything out of the ordinary. I have also taken a look at the Complete Unity course on different browsers and also decreased my internet speed, but was unable to reproduce the issue these students are describing.

At this point, it would be best for the students write in directly to Support with their browser and OS version and any extensions they have running. This information is vital whenever anyone is having a playback issue. I realize it’s frustrating for you and your students, but it looks like a couple of students in the thread have already started to realize that certain extensions they have running are affecting our video player.

We are continuing to monitor our site performance and the issue that one student brought up about the high CPU consumption on their machine has already been brought to our product and engineering teams for investigation.

My apologies again for the inconvenience this has caused and thank you for bringing this to our attention. Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with at this time and have a great weekend, Ben!

Best wishes,

[Robin_Beddall]

Hey,

Thanks for your efforts Ben
cheers

[pauld]

In the spirit of openness and honesty, after a very friendly and helpful contact with Udemy support I can report my issues were most likely all of my own creation!

Advice for others on Mac Air’s - don’t just close that lid and keep suspending everything for weeks on end because it’s convenient - clear that cache and restart your browser and computer once in a while!

Why this affected Udemy in particular who knowws, but I for one can’t really blame them anymore. I hope others get their issues sorted so easily.

P