Spanking Review

Now to the videos on the page……
The site says that the films can can be streamed in WMV format for broadband users or downloaded in zip-compressed format. Now here is a strange thing. …… we found that site is too slow to stream the movies in real-time. The files are not sent by a WMV streaming server and clicking on the streaming link by each move just causes a download to your computer’s cache which can produce a stuttering output in your WMV viewer. Only once the movie has completely downloaded will it play properly!

The zip files downloaded at between 25 and 41 kB/sec and a typical five minute movie took us nearly 8 minutes to download. This confirms the problem we suspected in our earlier mini-review that the Bars and Stripes server is too slow for streaming as it takes longer to download a movie than the length of the movie!

Another problem is that when using the Firefox browser clicking the download button opened a new blank page replacing the girl’s page, effectively making you leave the site … not really a good idea.

Now to our final anomaly with the site design. During this review I downloaded several zipped movie files. The zip file amink01.zip is 27,774 Mb in size. The unpacked WMV file is 27,734 Mb – 400Kb smaller than the zip file! I tried other files and the difference in size was no more than 0.5 Mb. For all the trouble of having the files zipped and expecting the client to unzip them again to view them, i would not bother for a typical saving of less than (or in some cases an increase) of 2% in file size!

If I were Bars and Stripes I would just offer the bare WMV file format for downloading. I would tell the clients to right-click and “Save Target As” (Microsoft) or “Save Link As” (Mozilla Firefox, Netscape browsers etc.) because just clicking on the file to ’stream it’ is a waste of time in my opinion. It will just lead to more downloads as the less computer literate clients will come back again and again to ’stream’ the same file if their computer cleans its cache every time they shut down – a ‘feature’ many firewalls and computer security programs now set as default. As a consequence the site will run slower for the users, the bandwidth costs will rise and thus the profitability of the site will be reduced.

Having got the technical stuff out of the way, what about the content you ask!

This site has some of the best and prettiest UK spanking models on it. In fact it probably has 80% of them on it!

The gallery pictures are clear and appear to be photographed using good-quality lighting. The composition is good with a mixture of long, medium and close-up shots of bare bottoms and pained faces. No problem there but each image is heavily watermarked.

This watermarking philosophy extends into the movies and I find it intrusive. When we go to the cinema, or more appertain, buy a film on DVD, we don’t expect an intrusive watermark on the body of the film. Titles front and back with copyright information etc. we accept, but not intrusive watermarking. Some sites do it, other don’t, and I know where my money goes.

The movies are each about 17-30 Mb in size and 4-5 minutes in length. Some are in multiple parts but it is not possible to download the complete movie. This is a shame because I like to see a complete movie.