OnForm already works great when you are completely offline, but it's a difficult challenge for app developers when you are in poor cell coverage or on bad wifi.
With our latest release, version 2.0.9 (tap the help button and you'll see our version number at the top of the pop-up menu) we've been making some under-the-hood improvements that enable better performance while in low-bandwidth settings. If you have poor wifi or cell service, these changes can significantly improve your experience with OnForm.
Tap the 'gear' icon on the Home screen and you'll notice some new options in the 'CLOUD SYNC' section. The first is 'Serialize uploads'. When enabled, videos will upload one by one, which will allow a video to upload by fully utilizing the available network bandwidth and therefore be playable on the recipient's end more quickly than if multiple videos were being upload in parallel, thereby resulting in multiple videos competing against each other for network bandwidth, and therefore resulting in slower completion time for individual videos.
The next setting to enable is 'Disable pro-active downloads'. Normally, OnForm tries to guess what videos you might want to play next so we sometimes 'pre-fetch' videos in anticipation of your watching them for a faster playback experience. However, this can also slow things down when you want to watch a particular video but the downloading of that video is competing with others being pre-fetched at the same time. Enabling this setting will prevent pre-fetching videos.
We've made a few more changes under the covers too, like batch uploading, better interaction when the app is running in the background and improvements to how we manage archiving.
Other tips are to change your recording resolution to 720p and your frames per second (fps) to a lower value as well. Something like 720@60fps is a good setting in general, but you may need to use 720@30fps for fastest uploads. This can be done in the camera recording interface as shown below:
We're always working to ensure a reliable, fast and delightful experience, we hope you find these advanced settings useful!
If you have any feature requests or suggestions, please reach out to us: support@getonform.com, we read and respond to every request.
Thanks for reading.