JW Player not playing one specific file

Hi - I am running Joomla 3.2.2 with SermonSpeaker 5.1 and JW Player. This has been running great on our site.

It takes a long time (minutes) sometimes, like with our latest entry (Prayer and Fasting) to load the player and get it to start playing.

Would you advise what we could do to improve the load time?

Our website is j1.woodburypres.com/index.php/sermons-list-2 . In particular, check the 3/2/14 entry Prayer and Fasting.

Thank you.

This is great.

The player has to download the whole file before it can start playing it. Since the file is ~20MB and the server apparently doesn't deliver that fast, it takes its time.

So either make the server faster, or your files smaller
As long as you don't record music, you can reduce the quality of the mp3 quite far and the sermon will still be good to listen:

• Make sure you only record mono. It makes no sense to make a stereo mp3 if you only have one speaker using a single mic. That will already half your filesize
• Reduce the frequency and bitrate to further reduce the filesize. You have to try here what will work best for you but you sure don't need 128 kBit/s and 44kHz

Thank you, Thomas.

I hadn't considered about reducing freq & bitrate. I'll do that. And changing to mono.

Is there a difference to consider between mp3 and m4a? The recording person before me (who came after me) switched from mp3 to m4a as superior, so I kept with the new style. But what really is sufficient (or preferable)?

Again, thank you for the quick response and guidance.

Blessings,
Bob

I just use mp3 myself because it's defacto standard.
As far as I know m4a indeed has the better encoding algorythm. However I think support for mp3 is still better across the various browsers and players. So I just stick with that.