

Ask HN: Honestly, what's the deal with YouTube's play bar? - hello_there_you

I can not believe this thing still exists and looks and works the way it does. Basically, if I want to point and click on a specific time of the video, I still can&#x27;t do that if the little circle is in the way. Who came up with that design??? Sometimes, you&#x27;re watching an hour long video where if you click on the timeline, it misses by several minutes, so you have to click again to get the god damn circle out of the way and then try to get it where you want it again. Is this a google product? Really?<p>All I want is to be able to tell the player that &quot;please start at 8 minutes and 32 seconds into this clip&quot;, not 7 minutes and 32 seconds into the clip and not 9 minutes and 48 seconds into the clip. There&#x27;s a huge difference there. I mean, am I crazy? I just need to understand the thought process here.<p>If I worked at this mysteriously amazing company I would change the circle to a 2 pixel wide line and deploy that shit before lunch today. Problem solved.<p>If you don&#x27;t know what I&#x27;m talking about: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;tk5PWrF.png
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fredm-de
Holy Moly, they seemed to just have changed the player a few hours ago. And
you're problem seems fixed.

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hello_there_you
YAAAY!! See, some complaining on hacker news and BOOM - progress. Your
welcome.

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Rifu
If you hold the circle that's "in the way", it'll allow you to scrub through
the video.

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hello_there_you
Try doing that on a touchpad(is that the word?). First when you click the
circle, it moves a couple of cm, then you have to try to move your fingertip
slooowly towards the time you want to start from. I mean, come on people...
what are we doing here?

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mahouse
Get a better touchpad?

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hello_there_you
Right. Jokes aside, I'm currently using a pretty new MBP. Still not
understanding the problem here. How is the circle a good idea? There must be
some technical reason for why they went with it. I can't imagine anyone
testing it out for more than 5 minutes before thinking "Yep, this clearly
sucks".

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zhte415
And cache. When wanting to rewind I'd like the forward part of the video to
keep downloading, not reload the video from that point and lose all ahead of
it that's already downloaded. That used to be the case, but changed around
2011/2012 IIRC.

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LukeHoersten
My buddy works at YouTube on the player and I asked him this same question.
Basically he said there's resistance to changing too much on the interface in
order to not mess with success. The good news is, they know the issue(s).

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hello_there_you
"resistance to changing too much on the interface in order to not mess with
success"

Oh my god. I see. Thx for the inside info.

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hello_there_you
Btw, all they have to do is change two lines of CSS.

.html5-scrubber-button {border: 0; width: 1px;}

But whatever, let's not risk anything here ;)

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moridin007
i feel your pain bro..

you can always add #t=03m22s to the end of the url to start from 3m22s from
the video.

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hello_there_you
Yes, as ridiculous as it sounds, that seems to be the only option.

