ArticlesLook at media players including YouTube, iPhones, VLC, Windows Media Player, etc.
Underneath the video is a slider bar representing the progress through the movie, and (where applicable for streaming players) how much has downloaded.
This is just a plain whinge. I originally was going to do a more nuanced article, with references, but I kept procrastinating, so I’ve decided to rant instead – it is faster.
Before I get to my key rant, let me take care of a few side issues that are limited to streaming players.
Nine times out of ten, I would rather you filled your buffer up more before starting rather than run out part of the way through. YouTube, I am looking at you – running out of buffer four seconds into the playback is ridiculous.
The one time in ten I don’t want to wait is when I don’t know if the video is something I really want to watch, and I need to sample it. Let me hit play mid-buffering to start immediately.
If you do run out of data and need to buffer, do NOT remove the pause button. I should not need to wait for you to finish buffering to say “Shut-up, I am currently on the phone.” (or any of a number of reasons I need you to be quiet right now.)
In fact, if you can’t start playing within five seconds of opening the page, do not start playing without an explicit command – having some browser window somewhere start making noises when I am in the middle of a phone call is not at all convenient – finding the right window to shut it up can take an appreciable amount of time – and I am not seeing the video the whole time that happens.
I appreciate your stupid business model includes playing adverts before showing me the content I want to see. However, your advert does NOT have the right to override the mute and pause button on my computer. I need you to shut up NOW, while I am on the phone.
Okay, now back to my key whinge – that slider bar.
It is time to let that slider bar go. It is not up to the job.
Maybe if videos were just 30 seconds long, the slider bar would give the fine-grained control that is required, but on a video lasting ten minutes to two hours, it is like trying to thread a needle wearing boxing gloves.
I want to repeat what just happened in the video. A plane flew past and drowned out the audio. The phone rang. The actor mumbled. I sneezed. Whatever the reason, just play me back the last 10 seconds again. No, not the scene ten minutes ago. No, not the scene 20 seconds later. Just the last 10 seconds.
Argh, I need to move the mouse only two pixels to the left of its current position. Why do I need to demonstrate such fine motor control (if it can be done at all)? Is this some sort of physical challenge?
The scroll-bar doesn’t scale in this situation. It is time for some new widgets to control sound and video.
The iPhone shows it is possible to innovate, but it misses the mark. It offers 2 dimensional slider, which uses the Y-position to indicate granularity of the scroll. It is even more a physical challenge than the original. More usefully, it offers a separate “rewind 30 seconds” button – however, it is still too coarse, especially if it takes three tries to understand what the damn actor said in their ridiculous accent while their head was turned from the microphone.
I appreciate that scrollbar is widely understood. If you don’t want to get rid of it entirely, that makes sense. However, it doesn’t solve a key use-case. Time to fix it.
Comment by AndrewD on October 17, 2011
Awesome commentary Julian.
You’ve just said all the things I would say about slider bars and videos if I could be farged. Reading you say it was much easier.
Comment by Paul DeLong on October 18, 2011
I may be completely making this up from some fabricated memory, but don’t the soundboards of audio engineers have multiple levels of dials for seeking through a recording, ranging from coarse to fine-grained?
That’s probably not the right solution either (and we probably don’t want to confuse the average end-user with even more options), but something closer to that might be better than what we have now.
Maybe a logarithmic slider, for which the scale gets larger as the distance is increased from the original position of the slider. But that would get confusing, since I’m assuming that when the user lets go of the slider, it flips back to linear scale (because indicating progress of time in logarithmic scale doesn’t make any sense).
Maybe we just need two separate widgets, to separate the functions: one which is “read-only”, and simply indicates linear time progress through the video; and another which is a slider (perhaps logarithmic, with the mid-point as “home” position) for controlling time seeking. It seems to me that combining these two functions into one control is the root of the problem.
It also seems to me that some videos don’t handle seeking all that well. I’ll skip back, only to find that it stubbornly stayed in the same place, or even moved forward somewhat. Maybe it’s a function of the video player I was using in combination with whatever encoding the video was in (in this case, VLC, playing whatever encoding PBS used to encode The Mechanical Universe).
Comment by configurator on October 18, 2011
VLC has shortcuts for this although no UI. I think it’s shift+left or right by default; I map it to the forward or back button on my keyboard usually.
Comment by John Y. on October 18, 2011
I think something as simple as a “back 10 seconds” button would be justified. Microwaves have “add 30 seconds” or “add a minute” buttons which I had originally thought were silly, but have now come to appreciate. A quick, short rewind is such a common and valuable use case that it would be worth the UI real estate for me. Implementation doesn’t even involve any fancy math. It just requires figuring out what a good amount of rewind is (10 seconds does seem about right, but perhaps it could be even shorter).
Comment by Zano on October 18, 2011
Excellent rant. Another example of why an ubiquitous solution, understood by all, still can suck. I’d think the Picasa scrollbar would work much better for this type of control (basically what Paul DeLong describes in his comment).
Comment by Alex on October 19, 2011
configurator – VLC has 4 different time jumps for skipping forwards and backwards. I’ve got them set up as: 5 (Shift+dir), 15 (Alt+dir), 60 (Ctrl+dir) and 300 (Ctrl+Alt+dir) seconds. (Where dir is left/right arrow key)
On the VLC iPhone remote, the position slider is scaleable by pinching/unpinching (reverse pinching?), which makes for a slightly clumsy but usable interface.