Using high-quality media to ensure a beautiful user and buyer experience.

Showpad allows you to customize your Experiences, Shared Spaces, Pages, … as much as possible.

In order to get the best results, there are guidelines you can follow.

Image quality

To make experiences and folders more attractive, you can upload background images, a logo and folder icons. 

Make sure the images are large enough. Images are made of tiny pixels (dots or points).
On “old” screens, there are 72 pixels shown per inch of your screen. On newer devices with “retina” or “high definition screens”, a lot more pixels per inch are shown, 3-4 times more to be more precise. This means that when you create an image of 280 pixels wide, it will take roughly 4 inches on your “classic” screen, while on a high definition screen, it will be only about 1 inch wide.
As we try to cover as much real-estate as possible on backgrounds and page galleries, images that look crisp and sharp on older devices might look blurry on high definition screens.

Get that video playing everywhere

Videos are a complex thing as they are made out of two parts: images and sound — well duh, Sherlock!

Both the images and the sound are compressed to make them easier to get shipped over the Internet. The software that’s used to compress the video parts are called codecs. One of the best-known codecs is MP3 for audio. 

The thing is, you need the codec to compress the video (or audio), but you also need it to decompress it. In other words, if you don’t have the codec installed on your mobile device or computer, you can’t play the video in Showpad (or any other platform).

So it’s important to use “generic” codecs. H.264 — for instance — is a very well-known and popular codec that’s available on almost every platform, even older platforms.

Secondly, you have the framerate: the number of images that are shown per second. To have a fluent video, you need at least 25 fps (frames per second).

Apart from using the correct codec and the correct framerate, it’s also important to keep the bitrate — the stream of information — at a mindful level. It’s noted down as X MBps, megabytes per second. In other words, it’s telling you how many bytes are send “through the wire” every second.

To make it easier to grasp: an example. 

A piece of film has a framerate of 30 fps and a bitrate of 10MBps. This means that every frame (or image) can be only 33.3 KB (10MB/30).

So why is the bitrate important exactly? Your network connection is limited to x MBps. A wired network nowadays can be 1000MBps, however, your mobile connection might be restricted to only 4MBps or even lower.

As all the information of the video needs to get downloaded, you need to have enough bandwidth — the higher the network MBps’, the higher the bandwidth — to have it all pushed through the wire. If your bandwidth is not high enough, the video will not play smooth.

The bandwidth is also of importance when it comes to your device: more recent devices can handle more data at once — at a processor and memory level — than older devices.

What’s happening behind the scenes

The Showpad platform creates thumbnails and optimized versions of your content.
Why? To try to get your content presented in the best and fastest way possible.

There’s one side-note, though: we don’t have a magic wand. We can’t improve the quality when your images or videos are not of the best quality. In other words: what goes in, also goes out as it was uploaded. Keep that in mind when you want to create a beautiful experience for your users and buyers.