
Flowplayer 5.0.0 - AntonTrollback
http://flowplayer.org/
======
dysoco
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.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I think people will figure it out. But it would be interesting to do some
usability tests on this.

~~~
ams6110
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?

~~~
tipiirai
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.

~~~
fjarlq
Speaking of controls, a request:

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.

~~~
tipiirai
This is a good one. So good that it's part of the next version. Here is a
demo:

<http://flowplayer.github.com/demo/seek/>

~~~
fjarlq
Hey, sweet! Thanks.

A couple issues:

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?

~~~
tipiirai
Initial version of slow motion and fast forward are now there. Use ALT +
left/right arrow keys.

~~~
tipiirai
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?

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TazeTSchnitzel
Really sleek, very nice minimal UI. More "fast and fluid" than Windows 8!

Love it, certainly going to use it when I need a video player. It even has
full screen!

Edit: Even better, it's responsive to browser width changes!

~~~
mddw
To make a <video> responsive, you only have to set its width to 100%... not a
big deal.

But yeah, I love flowplayer, it has a nice js API. Too bad it's not IE6
compatible.

~~~
taylorbuley
Why on earth do you need IE6 support?

IE6 is not even in the top 12 browsers according to StatCounter.

~~~
mddw
Globaly, yes. But if you want, per example, to target China, IE6 is mandatory.
<http://www.ie6countdown.com/>

(and even Japan is at 4.7% according to this site. 4.7% is significant
enough.)

~~~
fjarlq
Mandatory? For everybody?

There's a cost to supporting IE6, and a cost to not supporting it. Depending
on what you're doing, it might make much better sense to do something like:

<http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/>

IE6 usage is falling fast, even in China.

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seiji
How does this stack up to <http://videojs.com>?

~~~
johnx123-up
What about <http://mediaelementjs.com/> ?

~~~
tipiirai
Same as with videojs, you should compare at what Flowplayer can actually do:
<http://flowplayer.org/demos/> . There is a difference.

~~~
ddorian43
What about vast in both html5 and flash?

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degenerate
You guys finally came out with a release that rivals JWplayer. Congrats! I
switched from flowplayer to jwplayer when it started to get bloated/buggy in
v3. Looks like I might come back for 5 :)

~~~
tipiirai
Welcome on board!

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erikano
I tried to play the demo videos on my Samsung Galaxy S II (Android 2.3.5),
both with Dolphin Browser v8.8.2 and the stock web browser, but it doesn't
seem to work in either of them.

~~~
TorKlingberg
Same here. It does not work in the stock Android browser or in Chorme, but it
plays in Opera Mobile. It seems like a very basic oversight. I suspect this is
the reason YouTube is so dominant: It works reliably everywhere.

~~~
tipiirai
But not on iPads or environments where Flash is not supported. They have
certainly improved here but definitely not reliable everywhere.

And obviously Android we'll make Flowplayer work on stock Android browser.
That's a oversight from our part on the initial release.

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anssip
It forks flawlessly on iPad too, using the same controls as in desktop
browsers.

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acdha
Looks nice but I was really hoping for <track> support - based on some recent
testing, it appears that currently only mediaelement.js supports both the
Flash fallback and support for subtitles / captions.

~~~
tipiirai
Track element is coming. We thought it was not a blocker for a first release.

Note: I'm one of the developers of Flowplayer.

~~~
mfjordvald
Some US states require that you caption your streamed content to comply with
the American with Disabilities Act.

[http://articles.boston.com/2012-06-22/business/32352980_1_di...](http://articles.boston.com/2012-06-22/business/32352980_1_disability-
rights-education-disabilities-act-netflix)

I'd honestly say it should have been a blocker but at the least it should be
high priority for next release.

~~~
tipiirai
This is important.

However, most web videos _today_ are not associated with captions and made us
ignore this from the initial release.

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mfjordvald
I'm not sure I understand, why is that important? The way I read it is that
whether or not they're associated with captions they still require subtitles
if the company is registered in the "wrong" (I'd argue right) state and the
the video contain speech.

~~~
tipiirai
Flowplayer Ltd is located in Finland but this does not matter here. What
matters here is the feature set and how each feature is prioritized.

For the first release we picked the ones we thought were absolutely necessary
to make a great product. For the next one we fill in the gaps. For some people
captions are _highly_ critical and we cannot please them with Flowplayer 5.
For them we recommend our flash offering

<http://flash.flowplayer.org>

until captions are implemented to the HTML5 version.

~~~
anssip
mfjordvald is saying that the company serving the video can be in one of these
"wrong" US states where captions are required. Does not really matter where
Flowplayer Ltd is located.

~~~
tipiirai
As I said it doesn't matter and we think this is an important feature.

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liamgooding
Congrats Tero and Anssi, this is such an awesome update! Being on the FP
journey over the years has been great, and V5 proves that journey is still
very relevant and very exciting!

Going to have a play with it this week for sure.

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deepuj
Does GPL 3 mean that I cannot use it for in my commercial projects?

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tipiirai
No restrictions. You can use it commercially.

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supjeff
safari 6.0.1 on mountain lion: <http://cl.ly/image/0d0V1B1C3V28>

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woadwarrior01
Seems to work just fine for me with Safari 6.0.1 on Mountain Lion.
[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s186/sh/2b0936f2-0581-4b57-96...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s186/sh/2b0936f2-0581-4b57-968e-00b70e03d9c7/4725e32bff38c2d840e9f5c651faee63)

~~~
supjeff
fiddlesticks.

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denzil_correa
I like the clean design but for some reason by browser hangs up while
scrolling through your site.

Safari 5.1.7 on Snow Leopard

~~~
tipiirai
We currently have an Amazon micro instance! We have static pages served with
nginx. Thanks, we're studying these occasional 503 issues.

~~~
denzil_correa
Uh ... well it is not a 503 issue but looks more a HTML5 issue to me. My
browser works absolutely fine when your website is not in one of my tabs.

~~~
tipiirai
Sorry. Misunderstood your issue. Need to check this out with Safari 5.

