Look at media players including YouTube, iPhones, VLC, Windows Media Player, etc.<\/p>\n
Underneath the video is a slider bar representing the progress through the movie, and (where applicable for streaming players) how much has downloaded.<\/p>\n
This is just a plain whinge. I originally was going to do a more nuanced article, with references, but I kept procrastinating, so I’ve decided to rant instead – it is faster.<\/p>\n
Before I get to my key rant, let me take care of a few side issues that are limited to streaming players.<\/p>\n
Nine times out of ten, I would rather you filled your buffer up more before starting rather than run out part of the way through. YouTube, I am looking at you – running out of buffer four seconds<\/em> into the playback is ridiculous.<\/p>\n The one time in ten I don’t want to wait is when I don’t know if the video is something I really want to watch, and I need to sample it. Let me hit play mid-buffering to start immediately.<\/p>\n If you do run out of data and need to buffer, do NOT remove the pause button. I should not need to wait for you to finish buffering to say “Shut-up, I am currently on the phone.” (or any of a number of reasons I need you to be quiet right now.)<\/p>\n In fact, if you can’t start playing within five seconds of opening the page, do not start playing without an explicit command – having some browser window somewhere start making noises when I am in the middle of a phone call is not at all convenient – finding the right window to shut it up can take an appreciable amount of time – and I am not seeing the video the whole time that happens.<\/p>\n I appreciate your stupid business model includes playing adverts before showing me the content I want to see. However, your advert does NOT have the right to override the mute and pause button on my computer. I need you to shut up NOW, while I am on the phone.<\/p>\n Okay, now back to my key whinge – that slider bar.<\/p>\n It is time to let that slider bar go. It is not up to the job.<\/p>\n Maybe if videos were just 30 seconds long, the slider bar would give the fine-grained control that is required, but on a video lasting ten minutes to two hours, it is like trying to thread a needle wearing boxing gloves.<\/p>\n I want to repeat what just happened in the video. A plane flew past and drowned out the audio. The phone rang. The actor mumbled. I sneezed. Whatever the reason, just play me back the last 10 seconds again. No, not the scene ten minutes ago. No, not the scene 20 seconds later<\/em>. Just the last 10 seconds.<\/p>\n Argh, I need to move the mouse only two pixels to the left of its current position. Why do I need to demonstrate such fine motor control (if it can be done at all)? Is this some sort of physical challenge?<\/p>\n The scroll-bar doesn’t scale in this situation. It is time for some new widgets to control sound and video.<\/p>\n The iPhone shows it is possible to innovate, but it misses the mark. It offers 2 dimensional slider, which uses the Y-position to indicate granularity of the scroll. It is even more a physical challenge than the original. More usefully, it offers a separate “rewind 30 seconds” button – however, it is still too coarse, especially if it takes three tries to understand what the damn actor said in their ridiculous accent while their head was turned from the microphone.<\/p>\n I appreciate that scrollbar is widely understood. If you don’t want to get rid of it entirely, that makes sense. However, it doesn’t solve a key use-case. Time to fix it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Look at media players including YouTube, iPhones, VLC, Windows Media Player, etc.<\/p>\n Underneath the video is a slider bar representing the progress through the movie, and (where applicable for streaming players) how much has downloaded.<\/p>\n It is time for some new widgets to control sound and video.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1577"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1579,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577\/revisions\/1579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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