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Quommunication Video or TV.Elements?
First we had the Video Dream Theme, then Video Elements and VideoFlick were released. In recent days the Quommunication Video theme and TV.Elements by Jason Schuller have also appeared on the scene; both themes look quite similar, so how can you choose between them?
Quommunication Video
TV.Elements
Both themes have a dark colour scheme, with a main video window, javascript-powered navigation carousels for easy browsing of other available content, and post text located under the video. Neither theme requires external plugins, as the required coding has already been integrated into the theme, both are widget-ready and provide gravatar support in the comment area. Both themes are compatible with the most popular video formats (e.g. YouTube, MetaCafe, MySpace, Vimeo Facebook, etc).
Quommunication Video provides ajax-commenting, the navigation area supports four category headings and if you run into trouble the theme is supported via a busy forum. I really like the minimalist elegance of the main window, though I wonder whether the comment form should be hidden until requested by the visitor.
TV.Elements uses a drop-down menu for selecting post categories, which is useful if you intend to use more than a few categories. Using the menu requires a page reload, which may become tedious for frequent visitors (I wonder if Jason might work on that in an upgrade). The navigation area shows video thumbnails, which are more attractive than the text-only carousel in the other theme.
TV.Elements features five unique widget-ready sidebars so that you can have differing sidebars on your your Home page, Category pages, Posts, static Pages, and Search pages. The theme also provides 5 buttons on the left of the video window: Share (with links to social networking sites), Comment (linking to the comment form), Embed (to reveal the video embed code), Subscribe (to RSS), Read (to move down to the post text). The Subscribe button on the demo only seems to link to the feed for the particular post that you’re viewing, but that can be easily fixed.
And the price? A single-site license of Quommunication Video costs $95, while TV.Elements is nearly half the price at $50. That might be enough to make up your mind. I’d advise anyone interested in purchasing a video theme to try out both demos and figure out which one suits how you’d like your site to work. TV.Elements is certainly feature-packed, especially for the price, but you may prefer the simplicity and minimal page-loads of Quommunication Video.
So which would you choose? I’ve set up a poll below, or let me know in the comments.
Quommunication Video: Purchase | Demo | 1 Site License: $95 | 5 Site License: $175 | Developer License: $295
TV.Elements: Purchase | Demo | Single-Site License: $50 | Multi-Site License: $125
Great review on both themes. I first saw the Quommunication Video theme and was almost ready to buy until I heard TV.Elements was about to be released.
While both are very similar, TV.Elements seemed to be more featured packed for a lot less money.
In the end I went to TV.Elements and am very happy about my purchase. The theme is up and running on my site now.
http://www.ericschwartz.net
TV.Elements is looking good on your site, Eric. Thanks for your comment.
TV elements: Press75 provides excellent support. This theme, however has an unaddressed bug (as of july 24, 2009) as follows: click on a category and you will see a nice neat listing of all the videos. But as soon as you click on any video, the video will appear in the player, but the Category list scrambles to a random listing of all videos. It needs to stay within the Category when you click on a video within it. This is very confusing for clients, which is what I use it for (I am a video editor).
Quo… Video theme: This theme solves the problem as I stated above, BUT their support and documentation is AWFUL. You may post a question and wait days for an answer. Second, you cannot run this theme if your webhosting is on a Linux server. The AJAX functions only work if you are hosted on Windows. Be warned! So check first.
Hi Steve, your feedback on these themes is really interesting. I came across a similar category browsing issue with one of the video themes by WooThemes.
I’m really surprised that Quommunication Video only runs on Windows servers. I don’t think the theme has been updated much in recent months, or if it’s even compatible with WP v.2.7+. There’s more of a choice now with video themes from Elegant Themes, WooThemes, Press75 and Elite Themes plus some free themes with video support.