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.
