30 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Let’s Talk About the Video Player
First of all, thank you for listening! I had a specific thought after reading your post:
Our hope is to come as close to fixing the video player as possible...
(...)
So while we may never truly “fix” the video player...
These kind of came out of nowhere near the end. Is there a reason why your confidence in being able to actually fix the player is so low?
Is it the difficulty of working with legacy code? Just too many issues to solve them all? Funding?? It being more if an architecture issue?
Maybe dropping this code and starting over with a different solution would be best. Maybe even licensing a 3rd-party solution or using open-source software.
Video players are essentially a solved problem nowadays, so if fixing what you have would essentially be reinventing the wheel, (or upgrading wagon wheels to work on modern roads instead of just buying modern tire wheels for probably less money overall), maybe go with an off-the-shelf solution.
Comment by such084 at 27/06/2022 at 18:18 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Thanks for the thoughtful response! You touched on a lot of points we’ve discussed internally. When it comes to determining what “fixed” looks like, we believe it’s making meaningful improvements to our player experience so that a video plays seamlessly without issue. And that won’t happen overnight. It will be an ongoing process, and the video player itself will never really be “done.” For many reasons, including that Reddit is 17 years old and thus has a unique architecture, off-the-shelf solutions won’t really work in this case.
Additionally, we expect that there will be a group of redditors who may want us to default back to the old experience. We can’t do that, as outlined in this post[1]. There will be some folks who don’t like the full screen experience, and that’s fine - but they may never feel that video is truly “fixed.”
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/owjcoq/addressing_the_new_video_player/?sort=top