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Comment by xnickb | Hacker News Reader

Funny to see a blog post about UI from one of the most funded tech companies in the world, yet the player has about the worst UI possible:

- Audio volume has 2 levels: on and off

- Play button worked exactly once for me: it played and looped the video. Couldn't be stopped afterwards.

- The video progress bar has no visual indication of where it starts and where it ends..

Is this what Phind died for?

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The progress bar is over the video and it's easy to tell where it starts and ends. Most devices control volume, the video volume separate is just confusing matters for most. No issues with play and pause my side.

Sure as hell beats stupid Instagram style videos where you have no way to skip ahead. I think this is what future video is going be like, buckle up.

why would you not want a volume control on a video.... its like the most basic UX

because we have volume on the whole machine, laptop or phone.

And you only ever listen to one thing at a time, from one program at a time, and all audio content ever has its loudness perfectly normalized to a global standard everyone adheres to.

This and notification volume is generally set separately.

You seem to have taken a sarcastic comment seriously; in particular, this part is obviously not true:

> all audio content ever has its loudness perfectly normalized to a global standard everyone adheres to.

There is truth in the statement. Hate to break it to you volumes are not uniform even for single sources.

I don't want to adjust my system volume to change the volume of an over-loud video. My system volume is set for my comfort so my notifications and other applications are the right volume.

A volume slider on a video player is a really basic feature that every one should have.

Set for your comfort doing what exactly? You're basically just prioritizing one source of media over another As TeMPOraL has pointed out you only listen to one thing at a time. Notifications etc. also have their own separate volume settings generally.

> As TeMPOraL has pointed out you only listen to one thing at a time

Maybe you and TeMPOraL do.

Not to mention, maybe a long-running process will use some audio cue as a notification while you're listening.

(Actually, given the rest of the comment, I'm pretty sure TeMPOraL was being sarcastic.)

Audio ducking is a big thing these days and becoming more and more prevalent. All phones do it.

Or, like how I use it, normalizing different sites that have different baseline volumes, so I don't have to keep changing my system volume.

I take it you don't watch content on your tv or your phone or tablet.

Most things these days, good or bad, are not designed for power users.

Ironically many here I'm sure are running MacOS.

Instagram lets you skip ahead by dragging the a scroll bar at the bottom?

On some days, in some subset of videos.

Interesting, did Instagram start using actual streaming on their videos ?

I don't think so, they just don't bother giving you the progress bar. Force "engagement".

There's some good Chrome extensions that add the progress bar and volume controls back to all Instagram videos.

The cursors stealing the text as you scroll up is also infuriating.

Hate it or not, the only site which has usable video player is YouTube.

Even TV channels like CNN and FoxNews don't have a decent one.

It's like we need ASI to have a proper embedded video player. The ultimate software challenge.

I disagree, I always run into issues with the embedded YouTube player. No way of sharing. No clear way to share the link. Youtube logo covering half the video. To name a few.

There are many sites with better video players - they're from the industry well-known to be at the forefront of innovation in audiovisual technologies since before modern computing era.

It's just most of our industry pretends they don't exist, and instead implement toy-like video players to distinguish themselves, I think.

It runs soooo slowly in Firefox

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