

Playback Video Player - bpierre
http://mafintosh.github.io/playback/

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ddoolin
Mathias has done some really interesting things with the BitTorrent protocol
and Node.js and friends. I just saw his talk from JSConfEU last year and found
it pretty fascinating ([http://2014.jsconf.eu/speakers/mathias-buus-madsen-
javascrip...](http://2014.jsconf.eu/speakers/mathias-buus-madsen-javascript-
torrents-and-mad-science.html)). The applicability for this type of technology
does seem a lot greater than what it's traditionally been used for.

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wodenokoto
Other than playing with fun technologies (which I'm all for) what does this
bring us?

It doesn't seem to play many formats (one of the major strengths of VLC is
that it plays almost anything) nothing I saw about it that seems to scream
innovative UI or super efficient playblack on low-end devices.

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freeall
We wanted to see how easy it was to build "native" apps with
html/css/javascript today using atom-shell. And it turns out that it's
actually quite easy.

A feature we missed from VLC was that you could send video to Chromecast. That
feature is now in Playback.

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lawry
Even though it sounds fancy and it probably will work fine, something inside
me tells me a video player should be native.

Or can Chromium really playback video files better than
vlc/MPlayerX/QuickTime?

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espadrine
What does "native" mean? Chromium has its own video playback code, which this
is using:
[https://github.com/mafintosh/playback/blob/master/index.html...](https://github.com/mafintosh/playback/blob/master/index.html#L12)

Chromium relies on ffmpeg, which is a fairly efficient library. It even relies
on VLC's world-class h264 implementation,
[http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html](http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html).

~~~
revelation
I don't get it, so this is a video player app that's built on a browser which
then just uses the same thing my actual video player does?

I think we can skip a layer here.

~~~
espadrine
Your actual video player app is built on a UI library that just uses the same
thing this video player app does.

Sure, you could skip a layer and make your video player talk directly to X11,
but it wouldn't be cross-platform.

The browser is both an HTTP client and a UI kit, and some people are starting
to skip the HTTP client part, and use it as a UI framework, essentially a
competitor to Qt or GTK. That includes editors such as Brackets, Light Table
or Atom, video viewers such as the infamous Popcorn Time, and games such as
Game Dev Tycoon.

Picking a UI library is always about finding the right balance between cross-
platform, ease of development and memory usage. Kits such as node-webkit and
the Atom Shell (used here) give access to one more choice, albeit one which
may consume more memory (for now) than many other options.

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hanlec
The live streaming of the BT sounds like a very interesting feature. One that
could lead to possible improvements to those sites hosting videos behind
thousands of ads.

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porsager
Were there specific reasons in choosing atom-shell rather than eg. nw.js?

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mafintosh
atom-shell has good tooling support (i.e. [https://github.com/mafintosh/atom-
shell](https://github.com/mafintosh/atom-shell),
[https://github.com/maxogden/atom-shell-
packager](https://github.com/maxogden/atom-shell-packager)) which makes
shipping apps a lot easier atm

~~~
13years
"which makes shipping apps a lot easier atm"

Yet, the windows and linux builds are not available?

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deevus
How does the Playback Chrome Extension work? I can't see it anywhere on
YouTube videos... halp?

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iLoch
This + peerflix would be great. Like popcorn time but I can enter my own
torrent URLs.

~~~
chkuendig
FYI: you can just copy-paste torrent and magnet links into popcorn time to
play them.

~~~
fudged71
TIL! Thank you!

