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I don't get it why Coursera can't fix its video player. It's their core technology right? I can't resume videos from where I left, every video just opened for

I don't get it why Coursera can't fix its video player. It's their core technology right? I can't resume videos from where I left, every video just opened for 1 sec. is considered 'watched', to close the video popup on iPad I need to play 'find a close button' game and overall the user experience of watching videos sucks a big way.

ekianjo 14y ago
Why don't you download them instead?
- revskill 14y ago
  Because their hard disk is full ;)
- Correasa 14y ago
  In this particular course, some videos were heavier than 800 Mb.
natural219 14y ago
This appears to be a bug with the Chrome HTML5 player. Changing your video player to Flash should fix it, or just watch the videos in Firefox. I agree, though, the video player overall is steps behind Youtube and others. I'd guess it's because they built their player from scratch (it being a core technology) and they have lots of kinds to work out to get it up to modern video player standards.
PeterisP 14y ago
Yeah, their video player needs improvement. For me, the pause doesn't work properly if I pause for any significant time. If I pause the video for a minute, then everything is OK, but if I go to brew tea, then when I come back, the video always freezes after unpausing (well, it shows a couple seconds that were buffered) - probably they have some timeout issue there.
pamelafox 14y ago
Coursera engineer here. Yes, we've seen that the video player can be quite buggy for some. We haven't tracked down all the issues, but some of them seem to be due to the HTML5 browser player not working as well in some browsers. Some people are more successful using the Flash fallback or downloading the videos. We are working on moving to a new video player library and specifically looking at iPad improvements (button placement/clickability). Sorry for your bad experience, and thanks for the feedback.

ekianjo 14y ago

Why don't you download them instead?

revskill 14y ago
Because their hard disk is full ;)
Correasa 14y ago
In this particular course, some videos were heavier than 800 Mb.

natural219 14y ago

This appears to be a bug with the Chrome HTML5 player. Changing your video player to Flash should fix it, or just watch the videos in Firefox. I agree, though, the video player overall is steps behind Youtube and others. I'd guess it's because they built their player from scratch (it being a core technology) and they have lots of kinds to work out to get it up to modern video player standards.

PeterisP 14y ago

Yeah, their video player needs improvement. For me, the pause doesn't work properly if I pause for any significant time. If I pause the video for a minute, then everything is OK, but if I go to brew tea, then when I come back, the video always freezes after unpausing (well, it shows a couple seconds that were buffered) - probably they have some timeout issue there.

pamelafox 14y ago

Coursera engineer here. Yes, we've seen that the video player can be quite buggy for some. We haven't tracked down all the issues, but some of them seem to be due to the HTML5 browser player not working as well in some browsers. Some people are more successful using the Flash fallback or downloading the videos. We are working on moving to a new video player library and specifically looking at iPad improvements (button placement/clickability). Sorry for your bad experience, and thanks for the feedback.