Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Video is Coming to Reddit

redditblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–119 of 119 posts

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#111

Post by thomastjeffery »

EpicEng wrote: post #109
FridgeSeal wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the UX, the performance as well: there are few things more infuriating than going to pause an autoplaying video, but you can't, because it slows down scrolling on the whole web page. Then you finally get your mouse over it and if you're unlucky enough that the controls have disappeared you've got to wait for whatever 1 sec+ latency for them to re-appear. Then you've got to click them - an action once again,…

Definitely. Performance at scale is tough to get right here.

At scale? You only have one player.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#113

Post by thomastjeffery »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #105
mulmen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video playback is hard . Does Reddit have the technical resources to make this work? Only a handful of companies have pulled it off. Other than YouTube are there any web video players that are ready for prime time? Facebook's player is as much of a nightmare of usability as would be expected from the rest of their site, it's unusable for me on both an iPhone 6s in their native app and on the web. Netflix does a good…

The Netflix web player is good. I use it regularly. Some other good web video players: - Vimeo - Hulu HBO Now's web player is pretty good, tho not great. They definitely seem to have a hard time with their backend some times (e.g. around season premieres of Game of Thrones). In general tho, video playback is just the latest spiritual incarnation of popup ads.

> HBO Now's web player is pretty good

No. It is not.

In my experience, video stutters and splits even in Windows with 2 rx480s, and refuses to work in GNU/Linux.

Netflix's web player is great, except that it limits you to 720p.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#114

Post by thomastjeffery »

mulmen wrote: post #49
pgrote wrote: post #2

What is the end game for Reddit? Control of the videos so they can sell ads, right? Does the benefit redditors? No. Based on the testing so far the mobile player is not ready for prime time nor is the backend video infrastructure. Videos lag horribly and spin sometimes forever .. as if the connection was broken.

Video playback is hard . Does Reddit have the technical resources to make this work? Only a handful of companies have pulled it off. Other than YouTube are there any web video players that are ready for prime time? Facebook's player is as much of a nightmare of usability as would be expected from the rest of their site, it's unusable for me on both an iPhone 6s in their native app and on the web. Netflix does a good…

Video playback is not hard. If you are any good at UI/UX, you can make a great video player with HTML5.

DRM is hard (it's really an impossible pipe dream, but that's another conversation). Getting any sort of "DRM" to work in a browser with a good UI/UX is difficult, and most of the huge media providers (HBO, Vudu, etc.) are still using outdated, buggy, sluggish flash-based methods. The only decent video player using "DRM" that I know of is Netflix, which still has arbitrary limitations, like 720p video.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#115

Post by thomastjeffery »

mulmen wrote: post #49
pgrote wrote: post #2

What is the end game for Reddit? Control of the videos so they can sell ads, right? Does the benefit redditors? No. Based on the testing so far the mobile player is not ready for prime time nor is the backend video infrastructure. Videos lag horribly and spin sometimes forever .. as if the connection was broken.

Video playback is hard . Does Reddit have the technical resources to make this work? Only a handful of companies have pulled it off. Other than YouTube are there any web video players that are ready for prime time? Facebook's player is as much of a nightmare of usability as would be expected from the rest of their site, it's unusable for me on both an iPhone 6s in their native app and on the web. Netflix does a good…

Video playback is not hard. If you are any good at UI/UX, you can make a great video player with HTML5.

DRM is hard (it's really an impossible pipe dream, but that's another conversation). Getting any sort of "DRM" to work in a browser with a good UI/UX is difficult, and most of the huge media providers (HBO, Vudu, etc.) are still using outdated, buggy, sluggish flash-based methods. The only decent video player using "DRM" that I know of is Netflix, which still has arbitrary limitations, like 720p video.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#116

Post by mulmen »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #114
mulmen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video playback is hard . Does Reddit have the technical resources to make this work? Only a handful of companies have pulled it off. Other than YouTube are there any web video players that are ready for prime time? Facebook's player is as much of a nightmare of usability as would be expected from the rest of their site, it's unusable for me on both an iPhone 6s in their native app and on the web. Netflix does a good…

Video playback is not hard. If you are any good at UI/UX, you can make a great video player with HTML5. DRM is hard (it's really an impossible pipe dream, but that's another conversation). Getting any sort of "DRM" to work in a browser with a good UI/UX is difficult, and most of the huge media providers (HBO, Vudu, etc.) are still using outdated, buggy, sluggish flash-based methods. The only decent video player using…

The problem is most people aren't good at UI/UX but you have a good point. Does Reddit care about DRM in their videos? What about the CDN component? What about encoding support?

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#117

Post by propogandist »

corobo wrote: post #102
propogandist wrote: post #92

this will only lead people to steal content from other websites so they can get "karma" also, reddit tracks every outbound click with a unique identifier -- be sure to block all reddit tracking

You can turn that off in prefs -> privacy options

which means you're logged in and they're tracking your browsing activity anyway

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#118

Post by tomcam »

sergiotapia wrote: post #70
paulcole wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? They're hosting content you want to see? Can't you just watch their ads?

Some people consider ads immoral and predatory. If we're lucky enough to know how insidious they are, and have the means to block them, we should.

How do these supremely moral people expect content to be paid for?

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#119

Post by thomastjeffery »

mulmen wrote: post #116
thomastjeffery wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video playback is not hard. If you are any good at UI/UX, you can make a great video player with HTML5. DRM is hard (it's really an impossible pipe dream, but that's another conversation). Getting any sort of "DRM" to work in a browser with a good UI/UX is difficult, and most of the huge media providers (HBO, Vudu, etc.) are still using outdated, buggy, sluggish flash-based methods. The only decent video player using…

The problem is most people aren't good at UI/UX but you have a good point. Does Reddit care about DRM in their videos? What about the CDN component? What about encoding support?

I would assume Reddit would not want any DRM.

I can't speak to what they would use for a CDN.

Decoding support in HTML5 is pretty good (except for HEVC). The only things that Reddit would need to care about are file size and audio. It seems likely that Reddit would reject audio, or categorize videos that have it, so it could give fair warning.

Post reply on HN