7 ms·

Imagine YouTube that hosts everything it hosts now, but when you click "play", opens your video player of choice and streams the video.

by romaniv 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
piyush_soni 11y ago
People had imagined and implemented that long back. They were called plugins. Thank god, media player plugins are dead.
- the8472 11y ago
  the point is allowing independent applications to talk to each other (IPC) not to tightly integrate one application into another, that's a big difference.
- ams6110 11y ago
  I don't recall plugins ever offering much choice. "Please install Flash to view this content" is what I remember. If I could stream directly to VLC or a player of my choice I'd be happy with that.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    That is how Real Player, Windows Media Player and many others work, or used to work back in the early 2000's.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    Some (most?) browsers still do this when presented with a media file. Firefox in particular will use VLC on my machine for that purpose (or, if it's not installed, some HTML5 barebones media player, or some other media player that can be embedded if one is installed).
  - wmil 11y ago
    Before flash could play video, links that open in the media player of your choice were very common. It was a nightmare. Each media player would try to hijack every link type it knew about each time it ran. But there wasn't full compatibility. So you'd click a link, RealPlayer would try to open it, and the player would crash. The major players actively fought open standards, because they each had dreams of controlling a DRM & patent gated empire. Flash brought some sanity to web video. Although initially it had performance issues (it had issues with hardware overlays on some video hardware).
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      I wouldn't say "initially"; Flash is still notorious for severe performance issues. That said, so are most native media players nowadays. With that said, I'd be more optimistic of a kind of "media plugin renaissance" like what's being discussed in this day and age than I would be back in the 90's, what with all the insistence on standards-compliance and all that jazz. Eventually, with platforms like the .NET CLR / Mono catching on and becoming increasingly popular for cross-platform "native" (not quite native, but much more native than web-based) development, the chance of successfully reaching the goal that Java tried (and - arguably - failed) to reach back in the 90's is much higher nowadays.
      - swhipple 11y ago
        I'm a bit less optimistic. Having different programs for each content type would restrict the developers' control into how they can interact with the users. Simple playback of video? Not so bad. But if you want to swap the source of the video to your 240p version if the video is buffering 'too slowly'? YouTube-like annotations? Show suggested videos after? Developers aren't going to want to support all environment configurations, so you'd likely end up with a separate supported player for each website.. which doesn't sound better than visiting a webapp tested against the popular web browsers. Additionally, there's a lot of great research going into browser sandboxing and user-driven permission granting. Allowing content-compatible-but-unsandboxed XYZPlayer to take over content playback negates a lot of the potential benefits.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Netscape could do this back in 1995. One of its preference settings let you associate external applications with certain MIME types; when you clicked on a link pointing to a resource of that type, it would automatically open the external program to view the file, as if you had double-clicked on it. Similarly, you can do this right now on Android. When you click on a link, it fires off an Intent with the URL. Apps can register for this Intent and the user will be prompted for what program they wish to handle the link in. This is how the official YouTube/Google Maps/G+ apps work. It turns out that for certain types of content, users really, really don't like to wait for external programs to load. It's not a technology issue; the technology has long existed to use rich clients, consumers just don't prefer it.
    - the8472 11y ago
      > It turns out that for certain types of content, users really, really don't like to wait for external programs to load. And yet they click through full page ads, wait for "loading showcase" animations, scroll past parallax scrolling banner images and also wait for the ads on youtube videos and for the video to switch from 360p to HD. Users are strange creatures. I think if some effort were put into streamlining the native <-> web boundary then users would be quite happy with it. > This is how the official YouTube/Google Maps/G+ apps work. The question is, could this be standardized further? Basically a web standard that browsers agree to when it comes to talking to native apps that might offer specific services. At the risk of getting stoned to death for this: WebD-Bus? Although I think anything like that isn't going to happen. Browser vendors put security over everything else. Talking to native apps which already have access to the system would probably be construed as some sort of security risk, even if the user had to opt-in.
      - mattLummus 11y ago
        Ads exist in Native apps as well. At least in the web I have the option of browser extensions to provide a more customizable UX. With adBlock I don't get Youtube ads on Chrome so that point is null. As for the last point, Spotify has some version of this. My native (mobile) Spotify app knows when I'm playing on my computer and vice-versa.
  - zenware 11y ago
    Someone wrote a browser extension for Flash to be replaced with VLC on twitch. https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/comments/3273es/programming_a_browser_extension_to_substitute/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/comments/3273es/pro... It wouldn't be hard to make that work on other sites that have a flash player. But we aren't quite sure if it improved the performance or anything, it just felt right.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    This is an issue with the service not providing direct links to the video. If you open an .mp4 file in Firefox you can set it to open in an application through your "Applications" settings. By default it prompts "Open with..." or "Save as..." in a dialogue. If you open a direct link to a video you can open it to play in VLC (or player of your choice).
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Actually this how things work, on Android/Firefox. I long tap a video and open in MX Player, for instance. Or open a magnet uri with put.io.
- panglott 11y ago
  Ah, the golden era of RealPlayer.
- pyre 11y ago
  Media player plugins attempted to embed the media player into the browser, which is not what I think is being talked about here.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  Does anyone remember Google Video Player? I remember installing this to try and play videos and being disappointed that it was basically VLC with a rename and much functionality removed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos#Google_Video_Player http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos#Google_Video_Play... The same disappointment hit me with the early releases of Chrome browser - just Firefox with stuff removed.
wwweston 11y ago
You mean, being able to set media type handlers for your web browser? I seem to remember being able to do that two decades ago. I imagine you still can (assuming you're up-to-speed with the configuration UI of the week for your browser), but it's not something people seem to do a lot.

Imagine YouTube that hosts everything it hosts now, but when you click "play", opens your video player of choice and streams the video.

by romaniv 11y ago

Imagine YouTube that hosts everything it hosts now, but when you click "play", opens your video player of choice and streams the video.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

piyush_soni 11y ago

People had imagined and implemented that long back. They were called plugins. Thank god, media player plugins are dead.

the8472 11y ago
the point is allowing independent applications to talk to each other (IPC) not to tightly integrate one application into another, that's a big difference.
ams6110 11y ago
I don't recall plugins ever offering much choice. "Please install Flash to view this content" is what I remember. If I could stream directly to VLC or a player of my choice I'd be happy with that.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  That is how Real Player, Windows Media Player and many others work, or used to work back in the early 2000's.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  Some (most?) browsers still do this when presented with a media file. Firefox in particular will use VLC on my machine for that purpose (or, if it's not installed, some HTML5 barebones media player, or some other media player that can be embedded if one is installed).
- wmil 11y ago
  Before flash could play video, links that open in the media player of your choice were very common. It was a nightmare. Each media player would try to hijack every link type it knew about each time it ran. But there wasn't full compatibility. So you'd click a link, RealPlayer would try to open it, and the player would crash. The major players actively fought open standards, because they each had dreams of controlling a DRM & patent gated empire. Flash brought some sanity to web video. Although initially it had performance issues (it had issues with hardware overlays on some video hardware).
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    I wouldn't say "initially"; Flash is still notorious for severe performance issues. That said, so are most native media players nowadays. With that said, I'd be more optimistic of a kind of "media plugin renaissance" like what's being discussed in this day and age than I would be back in the 90's, what with all the insistence on standards-compliance and all that jazz. Eventually, with platforms like the .NET CLR / Mono catching on and becoming increasingly popular for cross-platform "native" (not quite native, but much more native than web-based) development, the chance of successfully reaching the goal that Java tried (and - arguably - failed) to reach back in the 90's is much higher nowadays.
    - swhipple 11y ago
      I'm a bit less optimistic. Having different programs for each content type would restrict the developers' control into how they can interact with the users. Simple playback of video? Not so bad. But if you want to swap the source of the video to your 240p version if the video is buffering 'too slowly'? YouTube-like annotations? Show suggested videos after? Developers aren't going to want to support all environment configurations, so you'd likely end up with a separate supported player for each website.. which doesn't sound better than visiting a webapp tested against the popular web browsers. Additionally, there's a lot of great research going into browser sandboxing and user-driven permission granting. Allowing content-compatible-but-unsandboxed XYZPlayer to take over content playback negates a lot of the potential benefits.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Netscape could do this back in 1995. One of its preference settings let you associate external applications with certain MIME types; when you clicked on a link pointing to a resource of that type, it would automatically open the external program to view the file, as if you had double-clicked on it. Similarly, you can do this right now on Android. When you click on a link, it fires off an Intent with the URL. Apps can register for this Intent and the user will be prompted for what program they wish to handle the link in. This is how the official YouTube/Google Maps/G+ apps work. It turns out that for certain types of content, users really, really don't like to wait for external programs to load. It's not a technology issue; the technology has long existed to use rich clients, consumers just don't prefer it.
  - the8472 11y ago
    > It turns out that for certain types of content, users really, really don't like to wait for external programs to load. And yet they click through full page ads, wait for "loading showcase" animations, scroll past parallax scrolling banner images and also wait for the ads on youtube videos and for the video to switch from 360p to HD. Users are strange creatures. I think if some effort were put into streamlining the native <-> web boundary then users would be quite happy with it. > This is how the official YouTube/Google Maps/G+ apps work. The question is, could this be standardized further? Basically a web standard that browsers agree to when it comes to talking to native apps that might offer specific services. At the risk of getting stoned to death for this: WebD-Bus? Although I think anything like that isn't going to happen. Browser vendors put security over everything else. Talking to native apps which already have access to the system would probably be construed as some sort of security risk, even if the user had to opt-in.
    - mattLummus 11y ago
      Ads exist in Native apps as well. At least in the web I have the option of browser extensions to provide a more customizable UX. With adBlock I don't get Youtube ads on Chrome so that point is null. As for the last point, Spotify has some version of this. My native (mobile) Spotify app knows when I'm playing on my computer and vice-versa.
- zenware 11y ago
  Someone wrote a browser extension for Flash to be replaced with VLC on twitch. https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/comments/3273es/programming_a_browser_extension_to_substitute/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/comments/3273es/pro... It wouldn't be hard to make that work on other sites that have a flash player. But we aren't quite sure if it improved the performance or anything, it just felt right.
- Nadya 11y ago
  This is an issue with the service not providing direct links to the video. If you open an .mp4 file in Firefox you can set it to open in an application through your "Applications" settings. By default it prompts "Open with..." or "Save as..." in a dialogue. If you open a direct link to a video you can open it to play in VLC (or player of your choice).
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Actually this how things work, on Android/Firefox. I long tap a video and open in MX Player, for instance. Or open a magnet uri with put.io.
panglott 11y ago
Ah, the golden era of RealPlayer.
pyre 11y ago
Media player plugins attempted to embed the media player into the browser, which is not what I think is being talked about here.
72deluxe 11y ago
Does anyone remember Google Video Player? I remember installing this to try and play videos and being disappointed that it was basically VLC with a rename and much functionality removed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos#Google_Video_Player http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos#Google_Video_Play... The same disappointment hit me with the early releases of Chrome browser - just Firefox with stuff removed.

wwweston 11y ago

You mean, being able to set media type handlers for your web browser? I seem to remember being able to do that two decades ago. I imagine you still can (assuming you're up-to-speed with the configuration UI of the week for your browser), but it's not something people seem to do a lot.