Well, that was fast.
However, I don't think deleting the pause button is a good idea, yeah: you can click in the screen, but some people might not realize that.
Well the pause button has been around since tape players and VCRs, I think it's a pretty well established control that people will look for. Why should clicking the video do anything?
This has been a big debate at Flowplayer before the release. At the end of the day it was clear to us. Play/pause button must go. Majority of users find it obvious that pausing happens by clicking on the video. This happens on both YouTube and Vimeo which makes it mainstream.
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.
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?
1) Looks like I cannot capture the keyboard event for number and alphabet characters on fullscreen mode. Just verified that with Chrome. Hoping to find a decent workaround.
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.
I can make it configurable for site owners and users but I'd rather find good keys that doesn't need to be changed. +/- are quite good .. maybe shift + arrow keys?
This happens on both YouTube and Vimeo which makes it mainstream.
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.
Well, thanks to smartphones and Flash video players, I think people are also used to click/tap-to-pause now, too. I don't foresee it being much of a problem. And minimal UI means minimal distraction.
Yeah, we need to give people some credit... If a dedicated stop button is the only thing left of the legacy tape machines and vcr's left us, then it makes sense to question that, too. Stopping the video by clicking on it is logical when no other options are given and everyone I've seen try this took about 3 seconds to figure it out. This gets even more logical if the video was originally started by clicking it.
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.
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:
Not really. You obviously need to take care of the height too and it must depend on video dimensions. Other players out there are designed for fixed widths.
Sure, but taking care of other parts of the player needs to be taken care of. Not that it's hard but it's surely not a feature of video players out there.
Anecdotal, I know, but I found VideoJS to be a bit of a mess. From a code point of view, the player instance would not destroy correctly resulting in a memory leak for single-page web apps and IMHO the CSS was a pain to work with.
VideoJS has done a pretty good job at promoting HTML5 video and giving a viable alternative for Flash.
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:
One of the things I love the most about HN is reading the comments on something cool (like Flowplayer) inevitably leads to the discovery of comparable and equally cool things!
You guys finally came out with a release that rivals JWplayer. Congrats! I switched from flowplayer to jwplayer when it started to get bloated/buggy in v3. Looks like I might come back for 5 :)
I tried to play the demo videos on my Samsung Galaxy S II (Android 2.3.5), both with Dolphin Browser v8.8.2 and the stock web browser, but it doesn't seem to work in either of them.
Same here. It does not work in the stock Android browser or in Chorme, but it plays in Opera Mobile. It seems like a very basic oversight. I suspect this is the reason YouTube is so dominant: It works reliably everywhere.
Looks nice but I was really hoping for <track> support - based on some recent testing, it appears that currently only mediaelement.js supports both the Flash fallback and support for subtitles / captions.
I'm not sure I understand, why is that important? The way I read it is that whether or not they're associated with captions they still require subtitles if the company is registered in the "wrong" (I'd argue right) state and the the video contain speech.
Flowplayer Ltd is located in Finland but this does not matter here. What matters here is the feature set and how each feature is prioritized.
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
mfjordvald is saying that the company serving the video can be in one of these "wrong" US states where captions are required. Does not really matter where Flowplayer Ltd is located.
Congrats Tero and Anssi, this is such an awesome update! Being on the FP journey over the years has been great, and V5 proves that journey is still very relevant and very exciting!
The dolly shot (the rails shot) near the end stutters on Chrome 21 on Mountain Lion. I think it's probably always stuttering, but it's only really obvious then. Maybe cut the dolly shot?
