So when I heard about the new video service from the PBA called XtraFrame, I was pretty excited. The PBA just recently announced it last week, but I actually got an earlier sneak preview while they were still in the development stage.
There was a lot of anger on the PBA message boards about StrikePass. Considering the moderator wasn't even answering posts at the time, I was wondering if he'd left and had not been replaced.
I was hoping somehow to get the issue escalated, so I looked for somebody's email address on the site where I could write in about this. The only address I found was for the Manager of Public Relations.
I sent her a note about the issues raised on the message board and she wrote back - early on a Saturday morning, bless her heart. She told me that there would be a new service called XtraFrame that would debut soon. So I figured that's why there were all the delays for StrikePass updates.
Although there was no link from PBA.com, it didn't take a rocket scientist to find the page for XtraFrame. When I saw the content I thought I'd check it out. There were some interviews, and placeholders for matches that linked to short videos of practices. It was clear that the service was still in the testing phase, so I kept it quiet. Besides, it wasn't my information to give out anyway. I just couldn't resist being an early adopter. The PBA support guy actually emailed me and said he noticed I'd signed up and wanted to know how the videos were running for me.
The interview segments looked great on full screen, but I need to reduce the size a touch when watching actual action, such as the matches and the oil tips. I usually watch StrikePass content at about 300% size on RealPlayer, which fills most of my monitor display. I can watch XtraFrame comfortably at about the same size on the Windows Media Player.
So far, I haven't encountered any problems with XtraFrame. The biggest nuisance I encountered with StrikePass was when the video and audio on the RealPlayer got distorted for some reason. The video would be heavily pixelated and the audio... let's just say that, if I was lucky, Dave and Randy sounded like the Daleks from Doctor Who.
Sometimes the video would get so choppy that it looked more like a PowerPoint presentation. I usually blamed my PC, but I often wondered if it was the downloaded media cache, as this distortion would often happen even if the download process was well ahead of the progress pointer and I had no other applications running at the time; other than the usual stuff like virus protection, etc.
I'm enjoying XtraFrame so far, and I hope it keeps improving. When I signed up for StrikePass, I enjoyed watching the earlier shows and since I only started following the PBA last year, I really appreciated seeing the 2005-06 replay. Hopefully there will be more shows from previous years being encoded for XtraFrame, and I'm looking forward to more Round of 8 action as well.