Comment by pxeger1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pxeger1 | Hacker News Reader

YouTube's video player (almost the entire rest of the site is beyond crap, don't get me wrong! I'm just talking about the watching experience) (assuming you have an ad-blocker, which you obviously should). Plenty of other video players have some of these features, but YouTube has almost everything.

- click to pause

- double-click to fullscreen

- customisable captions

- speed controls

- sensible keyboard shortcuts for practically everything (press ? to see them all)

- theatre mode

- picture-in-picture

- loop (on the right-click menu)

- dark theme

- all settings are saved and synced across multiple tabs (with the irritating exception of video speed, but that can be fixed with a browser extension)

- hover to preview

- drag to seek

- video chapters

- clear and subtle indication of video buffering

- auto-resume when you come back to a video after navigating away

- easy and obvious translation of all controls to live-streams and "premieres"

- pretty animations and obvious cursor changes that make it really obvious what you're doing (looking at you, Twitch)

- you can scroll in fullscreen

- "instant" page navigation that never gets out of sync with itself

- 4K support

- HDR support (not very good, but still)

- 60+FPS support

- 360° support

- all of Google's CDN resources behind it so it never lags

- excellent video quality detection that never picks an unnecessarily low-quality option when my computer could handle better, nor a too-high one that my connection can't manage

I have a few minor gripes:

1. Click (pause) and double click (full screen) interfere with each other. I don't really want pause to have more of a delay than it already has, but that's the only way to allow a non-pause double click.

2. I'd prefer if spacebar paused unconditionally. When focus is on other controls, it activates those instead, which I understand for a11y, but it's a bit annoying when other players do grab every space for pause.

3. I think < and > used to nudge by a single frame (when paused) but no longer do?

On 3: ',' and '.' go backwards/forwards by a single frame when paused.

Oh, yeah it does still work. Not sure why it was acting up for me the other day.

N.B.: You refer to the keystrokes correctly, while I refer to them using their modified characters (on EN-US keyboards, anyway) despite the modifier not actually being used, which I assume is why these keys were chosen.

On 1: the dedicated play/pause button doesn't have delay and can't be double-clicked for full screen.

Its an ok player, but its not designed well:

- No stop button

- No way to easily stop buffering

- Auto pops open the mini player when you navigate away from the page

- Autoplay being agressively enabled by default.

All of these make it like an nightmare ex-spouse situation where all you want to do is have it stop draining your bandwidth to play videos but it won't let you go.

It may be designed well for Google, but not for users:

- need to right-click twice to get picture-in-picture on macOS

- obnoxious (and often unskippable) pre-roll and embedded advertisements

- no download button

- no audio play feature

- background play is unreliable on iOS

- unstable back end API that keeps breaking playback in VLC

The most aggravating drag-to-seek in the solar system, bar none. Even xvideos is better.

The playback speed options are mega stupid. I want to speed up or down on fine increments around "normal speed", about the mean. I don't want 2x. WTF is that exactly? Let me listen to my audiobook on chipmunk voice speed? I need to be able to listen to The Talking Heads Puzzling Evidence at exactly 1.06 x normal speed. If I try to dance at 1.25x or 2.0x, I'll need hip replacement surgery or put my back out or both.

What's wrong with the drag-to-seek?

Also, there's a Custom link at the top-right of the playback speed popup where you can change it in increments of 0.05

> assuming you have an ad-blocker, which you obviously should

Stating the the obvious, but these features were developed by real people and revenue pays these developers, pays for the infrastructure, and pays the content creators. As an alternative for those who have the means, you can also sign up for a subscription to remove ads. I’ve gotten more value out of my youtube subscription than most other streaming services I pay for.

Huh. I have to begrudgingly agree that you're right. I have a few nitpicks and quibbles, but you're mostly right.

My counter-arguments which are mostly commentary:

- Speed doesn't go up to 3x+ (internal users can go up to 20x speed, see the source code)

- Focus issues mean left/right/up/down/home/end might change the volume, playback position or page scroll, and there is no indication of what will happen; I typically middle-click the video to focus it before using the keyboard, or sometimes try hitting 'k' twice to see if the video reacts

- There's no way to say "my connection is being stupid, please buffer this to the end"

- The speed detection often gets confused on my (objectively terrible) ADSL2+ and drops me down to 360p or 240p; I'm often manually switching back to 720p (the max my connection can reasonably sustain)

Everything else in your list though... I have to admit that yeah, those features do work :)

Position restoration would probably be my favorite.

YouTube Music, on the other hand... noope. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604172

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