1. Frame-rate awareness. Displays that can operate at different native refresh rates matching sources such as film and video are becoming more common. Providing support enabling displays to use the appropriate refresh rate has the potential to eliminate stuttering (that some people are very sensitive to) in properly authored content.
2. Reign in the annotations! Youtube's annotation system is being horrifically abused and is directly responsible for the "spammy" feel many clips have. Turning off annotations in your youtube settings is one of the single most impactful ways of improving your experience. This is unfortunate, since small, non-intrusive, tasteful annotations can enhance the experience for users. Just as ad providers are struggling against ad-blocking software because they didn't exercise taste and restraint in the past, so too are annotations in danger of being turned off and ignored by most.
I don't know of any video player outside of XBMC that is capable of (1). And it involves a nasty OS call to make a mode switch, which causes flickering on most machines. Variable sync rate, such as that on eDP, has yet to see a viable userspace API when not fullscreen.
I think presentation timestamps in the compositor will help a lot, at least to achieve perfect 3:2 pulldown for 24 fps content, and will help avoid jitter. I'm quite sensitive to the effect myself and run my "TV" monitor at 72Hz, and still have problems relating to timing jitter.
PowerDVD is also capable of setting refresh rates, although older versions consistently choose the wrong refresh rate for 24fps content for some strange reason.
My HTPC runs windows (necessary for Bluray support). I've hotkeyed a group of nircmd scripts that allow me to rapidly change frame rate on the fly, and programs like zoom player and vlc adapt very smoothly and give hiccup free playback. It would be nice if these programs could change framerate themselves. Very little work would be required to add this capability, but frame rate aware software is stuck in a primitive state for no reason that I can discern.
Problem is, annotations are plenty useful when used correctly. The only way to reign them in that I can think of is for people to not watch videos w/ spammy annotations.
IIRC, the YouTube annotations system stems out of Google's acquisition of Omnisio, a YC W08 graduate. (They went from starting YC to a $15million acquisition in ~6 months.)
I'd like google to stop making the GUI worse and start making it better.
For example, I like subscribing to various channels, but hell if I can figure out what shows I've missed from day to day. What I want
1) Click "play from subscriptions", start playing all the videos I've missed. If I'm in my living room, I'd like this to basically be my personal TV station. I'd like to focus it down to just play from one of my collections at a time if I want to since I've spent lots of time collecting my subscriptions into collections in the first place. If I get to a video I don't care to watch, I like to hit something like "skip" and just move onto the next one.
2) If I finish that or get bored, have a "find new channels" page.
Here's what actually happens:
1) Go to www.youtube.com shown "what to watch". I have zero interested in the recommended list.
2) Scrolls down, I see videos from 1 channel I've subscribed to. What are these videos? New? Old? Repeats? ones I've missed? It doesn't matter because I can't even just start playing the list. I have to click on one that looks interesting, watch it, then go back, click the next one, repeat until I'm irritated and don't want to come back.
3) Scrolling down more some of my channels have lists that scroll off to the right, some only have two or three videos, why? If I go to some of those channels, there's dozens of videos I haven't watched, why am I presented with these ones and not the others?
4) The 3rd "channel" in my list is one I'm not subscribed to and couldn't possibly have less interest in.
5) I've also categorized my subscriptions into different interest areas. But this "what to watch" list is just a mish-mash of stuff seemingly randomly selected from all of them. I have no way to narrow down or select all or some of the channels from one of my categories.
"What to Watch" is useless to me.
So there's a "My Subscriptions" section I can switch to.
1) It's set to "All Activity" so I see all the random stuff the people who own the channels I'm subscribed to are doing. Which I supremely don't care about in the least.
2) I switch to "Uploads Only"
3) Now I have a list of seemingly random videos selected from all of my channels. Still no option to "start playing". I don't know if these are new, old, unwatched, watched, missed or some other category of video. Google just appears to have populated my list completely at random.
4) This list is dominated by a couple high-volume special interest channels I'm subscribed to for easy access, but really don't care to see every single 20 second video they upload. I have them collected into a special interested collection, but there's no way to select just the special interest I want to watch at this moment.
5) When I hover over a video in this list, there's a hamburger menu, one of the options is helpfully titles "hide these videos". I click it to hopefully suppress these high-volume videos. It hides one video, not all of them. When I reload, it shows up again anyways.
6) There's an option to only show uploads from the specific channel, but I could do that just by going to the channel in the first place.
There's a permanent Hamburger menu at the top, maybe what I want to do is there?
Among lots of useless garbage, most of it duplicating what I'm already looking at, I see my subscription collections. Perhaps if I click on one of those I can filter down to just my interest area.
Okay, that seems to work. Now where's my "play all" button? How about "play since all new" or "play all since last visit". Or whatever. The list I'm presented with is the same kind of mysteriously populated list of random stuff I saw before, but at least it's focused onto a topic I care about.
In the mean time, at every opportunity, I get hit with countless recommendations to subscribe to more. But to be honest, what's the point? Youtube tries to kill all the value from subscribing to channels.
Also, the terminology is all wrong! I'm really subscribing to "shows" and collections should be more like "channels". I should be able to just "play channel" and have it start cycling through all the "shows" I've subscribed to.
It's gotten worse and worse. I used to really watch lots of content on youtube, and now I barely due because Google has managed to squash almost all of the value of what I've subscribed to and constantly inundates me with irrelevant bullshit I'm absolutely not interested in.
It's absolutely terrible, and it doesn't have to be.
Susan Wojcicki[0] is the sister of Anne Wojcicki[1], founder of 23andme and Sergey Brin's ex-wife. I applaud the author for not weaving it into the narrative. But I'm also surprised there isn't even a mention of it.
We want to see successful, hard working, tough woman that just made it. Damit, you spoiled it. We are still searching for the single one instance that defeats the claim that woman don't fly.
I am happy that her kids can explain to her the consumer aspects. Google will have enough savy engineers to cover the technical aspects.
Forget about the 3 founders (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim): She is kicking it now.
1. Frame-rate awareness. Displays that can operate at different native refresh rates matching sources such as film and video are becoming more common. Providing support enabling displays to use the appropriate refresh rate has the potential to eliminate stuttering (that some people are very sensitive to) in properly authored content.
2. Reign in the annotations! Youtube's annotation system is being horrifically abused and is directly responsible for the "spammy" feel many clips have. Turning off annotations in your youtube settings is one of the single most impactful ways of improving your experience. This is unfortunate, since small, non-intrusive, tasteful annotations can enhance the experience for users. Just as ad providers are struggling against ad-blocking software because they didn't exercise taste and restraint in the past, so too are annotations in danger of being turned off and ignored by most.