6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
#2Great engineering work but as a user I don't get why we need these: I just want the OS native widget that allow me to play pause seek and maybe choose captions. Especially on iOS 99% of these web players behaves awkwardly when you tried to pinch to zoom to full screen (usually it zooms the whole webpage, iOS native player just works)
The main incentive to have these custom controls I see is anti adblocking
Re: 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
#3I want to like Mux. We use Mux. But everything feels half done.
- No 2FA support, at all. Support says it's not on their roadmap. Not acceptable in 2026.
- Editing subtitles requires a series of API calls, meaning I had to make a mini editor for our staff to change a word.
- Same with editing anything really. Playback restrictions, glossaries etc. There's no UI for doing it in-app. I understand that the majority of traffic is via the API, but having nothing in-app feels like an omission rather than a choice.
- Every video has multiple keys; uploads, assets, playbacks. And it's a pain moving from one to another.
Overall we use them, but I wouldn't choose to use them again.
Re: 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
#4This post just makes me reflect on the sad state of the web and how it continues growing its own little silos that don't integrate with native applications. Actually, I already have the perfect video player (mpv) and I should be able to use that for everything. The dream of the user-agent continues dying: just to show you a few more ads, just for a designer to pad their portfolio with another video player design, just to create redundant work so programmers can keep their six figure jobs.
Note how the author in detailing their 6-year journey only focuses on their customers without any care for the actual end-users that have to engage with these tools in their final form.
Re: 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
#5I want to like Mux. We use Mux. But everything feels half done. - No 2FA support, at all. Support says it's not on their roadmap. Not acceptable in 2026. - Editing subtitles requires a series of API calls, meaning I had to make a mini editor for our staff to change a word. - Same with editing anything really. Playback restrictions, glossaries etc. There's no UI for doing it in-app. I understand that the majority of t…
With their tagline being “video for developers”, isn’t this their whole thing? It seems like another service would be a better fit if having a management UI is a requirement.
Re: 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
#6This post just makes me reflect on the sad state of the web and how it continues growing its own little silos that don't integrate with native applications. Actually, I already have the perfect video player (mpv) and I should be able to use that for everything. The dream of the user-agent continues dying: just to show you a few more ads, just for a designer to pad their portfolio with another video player design, jus…
This problem needs to be addressed at an operating system level. Websites should be reduced to (paid-for) content providers.
Current situation around ad-blocking is just symptom of the problem. Users try to extract value from the website they are presented with and websites try to hook users into their platform without chance to leave.
The good thing it is only software
Re: 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
#7This post just makes me reflect on the sad state of the web and how it continues growing its own little silos that don't integrate with native applications. Actually, I already have the perfect video player (mpv) and I should be able to use that for everything. The dream of the user-agent continues dying: just to show you a few more ads, just for a designer to pad their portfolio with another video player design, jus…
This problem needs to be addressed at an operating system level. Websites should be reduced to (paid-for) content providers. Current situation around ad-blocking is just symptom of the problem. Users try to extract value from the website they are presented with and websites try to hook users into their platform without chance to leave. The good thing it is only software
All the major newspapers (e.g., WSJ) and magazines (e.g., NatGeo) of the world have already transitioned to online subscription model.
Guess whether their reader base has increased or decreased from their heydays.
Most newspapers or magazines have reduced or stopped their print editions.
Subscription model works only for niche audience, willing to pay for the premium content and premium experience. Rest of the audience will not pay a penny - they are okay to use the site if it is free but with ads, and many users will use some adblocker, but if site refuses to show content if it detects adblocker, they will simply go elsewhere rather than paying for a subscription.
Re: 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
#8Great engineering work but as a user I don't get why we need these: I just want the OS native widget that allow me to play pause seek and maybe choose captions. Especially on iOS 99% of these web players behaves awkwardly when you tried to pinch to zoom to full screen (usually it zooms the whole webpage, iOS native player just works) The main incentive to have these custom controls I see is anti adblocking
Until recently HLS support was not great without a custom player. https://caniuse.com/http-live-streaming
Re: 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
This problem needs to be addressed at an operating system level. Websites should be reduced to (paid-for) content providers. Current situation around ad-blocking is just symptom of the problem. Users try to extract value from the website they are presented with and websites try to hook users into their platform without chance to leave. The good thing it is only software
All the major newspapers (e.g., WSJ) and magazines (e.g., NatGeo) of the world have already transitioned to online subscription model. Guess whether their reader base has increased or decreased from their heydays. Most newspapers or magazines have reduced or stopped their print editions. Subscription model works only for niche audience, willing to pay for the premium content and premium experience. Rest of the audien…
I don’t think your newspaper analogy works very well here.
Newspapers had willing subscribers especially since they had few alternatives. Their subscriber base was not niche at all.
These newspapers were also heavily subsidized by not only advertisements but paid classified ads.
You either caught the local/evening news on TV or subscribed to a small handful of locally delivered papers. Maybe they also deliver major national newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
The willingness to subscribe didn’t go away, the problem is that alternatives quickly arrived that didn’t cost any money.
Free online classifieds ate the newspaper cash cow. People are often still willing to pay for the services that newspapers provided: just see eBay, Autotrader, and Craigslist. The problem is that your local paper can’t match the product that the internet makes available.
Re: 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over
#10Mildly related question for the people in the thread:
How do I seek to the exact first frame of a timestamp with mux? I've tried a few things but it seems to always go to the nearest keyframe rather than the first frame at e.g. 00:34. This is sensible default behaviour but bad for my use case.