5 ms·

Can we talk about the Chrome video and music player regression? It's a horrible decrease in user experience while gaining only very, very, very marginal "visual

Can we talk about the Chrome video and music player regression? It's a horrible decrease in user experience while gaining only very, very, very marginal "visual" wins. Please bring back the old media player!

andrepd 8y ago
>It's a horrible decrease in user experience while gaining only very, very, very marginal "visual" wins. Isn't that an accurate summary of Google design in the past ~5 years? What revoltong incompetence.
cpcallen 8y ago
You mean the one where the pause button sits in the middle of the screen while the video is playing, and almost nothing you do will make it go away?
- always_good 8y ago
  Reminds me of the massive block that appears when you change the volume on OSX. Perfect position to cover subtitles of the full-screen movie you're watching. On more than one occasion, I've had to rewind the video to catch a critical subtitled word because I made the mistake of making a minor volume adjustment at the wrong time. You can turn off the block entirely from the terminal, but then you lose the indication of where you are in the volume continuum.
wlesieutre 8y ago
YouTube goes out of its way to replace iOS's fullscreen media viewer with a terrible one. Maybe they felt like they had to make it look like the desktop UI or they needed the quality / settings buttons, but the scrubber is just bad. And they took away the +/- 15 seconds buttons, which are much much better for skipping around long videos than the scrubber is.
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  Mystery meet navigation! On Android, I accidentally found tapping multiple times quickly on the sides of a videos does this and the more you times you tap the further back it goes. Mystery meat navigation is probably the worst paradigm in all of us. Even icons with stupid, but distinguishable icons is better.
  - janekm 8y ago
    YouTube on iOS has the same scrubber. Which is great once you discover it... oh well.
    - zrobotics 8y ago
      Which is a shame, because desktop YouTube is one 8f the best video player UIs that I have ever used, and I'm still searching for a desktop video player that is as usable. Although the mobile version is unconscionably awful, I almost always have to guess at what the controls do and avoid opening the app.
      - qt4apologist 8y ago
        Are you joking? Desktop YouTube is one of the worst UIs I've had to deal with. Controls constantly popping up over the video, annotations on by default, autoplay to the next video on by default. If you're in full screen mode and switch to another app, then come back, the video is just ... gone. It's not on the page, but it's not full-screen anymore, either. Buttons and options that don't show up consistently on every video. No way to fix the aspect ratio of videos created by morons. Crap everywhere on the page. I seriously find it hard to believe that anyone would consider YouTube to have a good video player interface, let alone the best.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    Ha, good to know. I've discovered that the pinch-outward-to-fullscreen gesture is disabled on the YouTube video player (you get a "Full screen is unavailable. Learn More." notice). But if you: 1) go to shitty-fullscreen 2) hit picture-in-picture 3) go back to fullscreen 4) close fullscreen back to normal view 5) pinch-outward to zoom It will put you into the native iOS fullscreen player. So I think I'll keep doing that rather than learn the mystery meat navigation. Dear Googlers reading this: you may be tempted to go out of your way to fuck it up further and remove this workaround. Pretty please don't? Thanks.
r721 8y ago
chrome://flags/#enable-modern-media-controls -> Disabled

andrepd 8y ago

>It's a horrible decrease in user experience while gaining only very, very, very marginal "visual" wins. Isn't that an accurate summary of Google design in the past ~5 years? What revoltong incompetence.

cpcallen 8y ago

You mean the one where the pause button sits in the middle of the screen while the video is playing, and almost nothing you do will make it go away?

always_good 8y ago
Reminds me of the massive block that appears when you change the volume on OSX. Perfect position to cover subtitles of the full-screen movie you're watching. On more than one occasion, I've had to rewind the video to catch a critical subtitled word because I made the mistake of making a minor volume adjustment at the wrong time. You can turn off the block entirely from the terminal, but then you lose the indication of where you are in the volume continuum.

wlesieutre 8y ago

YouTube goes out of its way to replace iOS's fullscreen media viewer with a terrible one. Maybe they felt like they had to make it look like the desktop UI or they needed the quality / settings buttons, but the scrubber is just bad. And they took away the +/- 15 seconds buttons, which are much much better for skipping around long videos than the scrubber is.

jimktrains2 8y ago
Mystery meet navigation! On Android, I accidentally found tapping multiple times quickly on the sides of a videos does this and the more you times you tap the further back it goes. Mystery meat navigation is probably the worst paradigm in all of us. Even icons with stupid, but distinguishable icons is better.
- janekm 8y ago
  YouTube on iOS has the same scrubber. Which is great once you discover it... oh well.
  - zrobotics 8y ago
    Which is a shame, because desktop YouTube is one 8f the best video player UIs that I have ever used, and I'm still searching for a desktop video player that is as usable. Although the mobile version is unconscionably awful, I almost always have to guess at what the controls do and avoid opening the app.
    - qt4apologist 8y ago
      Are you joking? Desktop YouTube is one of the worst UIs I've had to deal with. Controls constantly popping up over the video, annotations on by default, autoplay to the next video on by default. If you're in full screen mode and switch to another app, then come back, the video is just ... gone. It's not on the page, but it's not full-screen anymore, either. Buttons and options that don't show up consistently on every video. No way to fix the aspect ratio of videos created by morons. Crap everywhere on the page. I seriously find it hard to believe that anyone would consider YouTube to have a good video player interface, let alone the best.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  Ha, good to know. I've discovered that the pinch-outward-to-fullscreen gesture is disabled on the YouTube video player (you get a "Full screen is unavailable. Learn More." notice). But if you: 1) go to shitty-fullscreen 2) hit picture-in-picture 3) go back to fullscreen 4) close fullscreen back to normal view 5) pinch-outward to zoom It will put you into the native iOS fullscreen player. So I think I'll keep doing that rather than learn the mystery meat navigation. Dear Googlers reading this: you may be tempted to go out of your way to fuck it up further and remove this workaround. Pretty please don't? Thanks.

r721 8y ago

chrome://flags/#enable-modern-media-controls -> Disabled