Flowplayer 5.0.0(flowplayer.org) |
Flowplayer 5.0.0(flowplayer.org) |
Fitt's Law directly tells us how efficient "the video as button" approach is: if we presume that a hypothetical start/stop button is 1/10th of the width of the whole video (which would be one large button!) then the time to navigate to the button can be up to 10 times slower. (Testing this now with Hacker News' minuscule "reply" button.)
With touchscreens becoming more and more common, this probably becomes a standard anyway, as people are now starting to connect interacting with objects with the objects themselves, not with separate buttons.
Love it, certainly going to use it when I need a video player. It even has full screen!
Edit: Even better, it's responsive to browser width changes!
But yeah, I love flowplayer, it has a nice js API. Too bad it's not IE6 compatible.
IE6 is not even in the top 12 browsers according to StatCounter.
Flowplayer is not just HTML5 video but common API for video - no matter what the backend is: the VIDEO tag or Flash (for older browsers).
This universal API is for both CSS and JavaScript. Same CSS rules or JavaScript methods apply for both backends. Think of implementing plugins or skins that work on all browsers and devices.
That's not all. A lot of features that were only there for Flash are now available for HTML5: cuepoints, playlists, random seeking, fullscreen, keyboard shortucts.. to name a few. For a full list of features please have a look at:
Demos: http://flowplayer.org/demos/
Make sure you try with various browsers. Note: iPad support is unbeatable.
Thanks for the link!
http://flowplayer.github.com/demo/seek/
This is for upcoming 5.0.1 version.
And obviously Android we'll make Flowplayer work on stock Android browser. That's a oversight from our part on the initial release.
Note: I'm one of the developers of Flowplayer.
http://articles.boston.com/2012-06-22/business/32352980_1_di...
I'd honestly say it should have been a blocker but at the least it should be high priority for next release.
Going to have a play with it this week for sure.
Safari 5.1.7 on Snow Leopard
(and even Japan is at 4.7% according to this site. 4.7% is significant enough.)
There's a cost to supporting IE6, and a cost to not supporting it. Depending on what you're doing, it might make much better sense to do something like:
http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/
IE6 usage is falling fast, even in China.
And when it's possible to remove an UI element we'll certainly do it. We want to make the player as minimal as possible and make the video star of the show. Now more than ever.
I want to be able to repeatedly replay selected moments in videos.
So, I hover my mouse pointer over the seek slider at a certain point in the video so that I can repeatedly click that point to repeatedly replay that particular moment.
But most video players (including Flowplayer) cause the controls to disappear after a few seconds, even if I just barely clicked.
This forces me to wiggle the mouse to wake up the controls right when I don't want to move my mouse because it's remembering a position in the video for me.
I would welcome any solution to this problem. A keyboard solution might work well. Youtube has keyboard shortcuts '1', '2', '3', for jumping to 10%, 20%, 30% into the video. I wish you could hit '.' or something to jump to the last position I set by clicking my mouse on the seek slider.
Also, I wish the controls did not fade away when I am hovering over them, using them.
By the way, Flowplayer seems to have a bug: if I attempt to hover over a point in the seek slider and repeatedly seek to that point, after the first click or two, it begins ignoring my seek request.
By way of contrast, YouTube players open the video in a new window when embedded in other sites.
Given FlowPlayer players will often find themselves in similar-looking situations (embedded in a post, or whatever), there's potential for confusion or hesitation there.
However, most web videos today are not associated with captions and made us ignore this from the initial release.
For the first release we picked the ones we thought were absolutely necessary to make a great product. For the next one we fill in the gaps. For some people captions are highly critical and we cannot please them with Flowplayer 5. For them we recommend our flash offering
until captions are implemented to the HTML5 version.
A couple issues:
1) The number keys don't work when in full screen mode.
2) Also the keys don't work at all if the mouse pointer is outside the video rectangle. (Is that a limitation of the web browser interface?)
It'd be great to have a few more keyboard shortcuts too. Left/right arrow keys to skip backward/forward 10 seconds? Keys for double speed, half speed, and frame-by-frame playback mode? Hit '?' to see a list of keyboard shortcuts?
2) That's intentional. Flowplayer is designed so that you can have multiple instances on a page and you can control one when you hover it or control with keyboard. When you're outside the player keyboard should control the page. For example spacebar will scroll one page.
Left/Right are already there in current version.
Slow motion and "?" are both good ideas. Probably implement them too.
One issue: on my Macs I've bound ALT + left/right (aka OPTION left/right) to change virtual desktops.
I unbound those keys so that I could try out your new feature, and it works great...very cool.
Not sure what you can do for guys like me who are in the habit of already using those keys. Also not sure what I can do.
I expect it will not be easy for you to provide a good way for me to customize my Flowplayer keys.
So, I wonder if it would make sense to provide a Flowplayer alternative to alt-left/right that users would be unlikely to remap. Ideas: +-, <>, []
What do you think?