Comments on: HTML5 video tag update

By: video encoding

video encoding — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:47:47 +0000

very helpfull thanks.
waiting for the future features.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:04:37 +0000

Looks good, but please please add full screen control!

By: Sebastiaan

Sebastiaan — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:35:17 +0000

I like the way this is going. I don’t think Quicktime and Youtube have self-deprecating scrub bars, though; especially Youtube has an intensely branded highlight scheme and Quicktime comes with the weird ‘forward’ and ‘back’ buttons and the end of the bar. Vimeo’s I’ve always loved, simply because it’s so very bare-bones and simple.

By: Jeff Walden

Jeff Walden — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:01:12 +0000

Fair enough, I just wanted to be sure you knew that no button specifically means no affordance, not “not usable” or some similarly vague term.

Practically, I think it’s necessary to have some sort of knob to indicate how to use widgets, so I don’t really like removing the button. The indicator you propose is insufficient for me because it requires the cursor already to be hovering in the appropriate place, where I would be more likely to look before leaping, figuratively speaking. If I’m not convinced clicking on the bar does anything, I’m not going to move my mouse there in the first place (unless, of course, the cursor is serendipitously positioned when I first want to seek elsewhere in the video).

By: David

David — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:17:05 +0000

Jeff: That is exactly why I was saying that having such a button is a bad idea. It screams to be dragged, and that is what people will do—over and over and over again, no matter how horribly inefficient and attention-killing such an action is. If there is nothing that looks like it can be dragged (and the cursor doesn’t change to the grab cursor), people will very quickly figure out that you can click anywhere to seek. Making this more obvious would, of course, be useful—such as by adding an indicator in the seek bar when the cursor hovers over it.

By: Jeff Walden

Jeff Walden — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 05:52:06 +0000

David, “affordance” refers to an aspect of something that makes its functionality evident. A bar which hinges downward across a door has an affordance for pushing. The handle of a mug has an affordance for grasping. A button has an affordance for clicking, and particularly in the context of video online I think a button on a bar has an affordance for dragging. The entire bar might be clickable, but if that’s not visibly apparent from the interface and can only be discovered by attempting it, there’s no affordance for clickability.

By: Justin Dolske

Justin Dolske — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:15:38 +0000

Controls will not be styleable by web pages, although themes/extensions will be able to. However, web pages *can* implement their own controls. The built-in videocontrols just use the standard media element JS APIs, so everything they do a web page can do too.

By: AndersH

AndersH — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:28:42 +0000

In your gallery of video controls, I believe the vimeo player is the only one that puts the controls inside the video frame. That is annoying.

By: Aza Raskin

Aza Raskin — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:35:02 +0000

This is looking very pretty! It’s super exciting to see the level of polish going into this design.

Two thoughts:

(1) Volume: Try to minimize the number of clicks it took to do common actions — i.e., reduce the interaction complexity. Having a button which you first have to click and then having to scrub the volume control is a bit click-full. See Vimeo, Songza, and HypeMachine for more streamlined interaction, where the sound level is exposed in the bar (without overloading visual complexity).

(2) Play/pause being conjoined. It’s currently mocked up as a toggle, which inevitably leads to mode errors. Take the common case where the network hiccups and the user has to wait for more video to stream in. In this case, does the triangle being shown mean the video is “playing” or that clicking it will “play”. People end up clicking on the button multiple times until something moves. It’s best to split the buttons to avoid that confusion (see Songza).

By: Jorge

Jorge — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:58:00 +0000

Will it be possible to change the appearance of the video controls using CSS?