<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head><meta charset="UTF-8"><title>Music</title></head>
<body>
<div id="app"></div>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/webamp"></script>
<script>
const webamp = new Webamp();
webamp.setTracksToPlay([
{url: "http://example.com/The%20Gathering%20-%20Travel.mp3", defaultName: "The Gathering - Travel", duration: 1.0, metaData: {title: "The Gathering - Travel", artist: " "}, },
{url: "http://example.com/Muse%20-%20Plug%20In%20Baby.mp3", defaultName: "Muse - Plug In Baby", duration: 1.0, metaData: {title: "Muse - Plug In Baby", artist: " "}, }, ]);
webamp.renderWhenReady(document.getElementById("app"));
</script>
</body></html>I just happen to be working on a media app (a video editor) and previously I have built a few video players (in both Flash and HTML/JS). We actually tried to use web components on one player (back in 2015-ish) and they were a constant pain that we eventually discarded in favor of plain old JavaScript. Strangely enough, for my current media app I've been using web components (e.g. a video editor timeline) and so far it is going very well. I'm not sure what changed or if it is just the case that the slow advancement of the web has brought compatibility far enough to make it viable.
I've just skimmed the Media Chrome docs and have only taken a quick glance at the github repo, but I like your design principles and architecture notes. My main concerns about adopting something like this (especially since I have a lot of experience building exactly stuff like this from scratch) are extensibility (e.g. how hard would it be to modify my timeline component to fit into the MediaController paradigm) and file size. One advantage of doing everything oneself is that you have everything you need and nothing more. I'm sure Media Chrome has a lot of stuff I just won't need (but someone else will) - the questions is how much bloat I am taking on for things I won't ever use. And not just components I won't use, but unused features of the components I will use. Sometimes it is just a matter of existing unnecessary functionality getting in the way of a lower-level kind of extensibility.
As an aside, your `media-elements` repo [1] does not have a license file. I see in the package.json that the elements are also MIT but having an explicit LICENSE file is always appreciated.
That being said, this is a very tempting library. At the least I will probably steal the idea to wrap my components in a media-controller like element since I've been using the containing page so far to stich my elements together and I wanted a nicer abstraction.
I'm glad you like the controller architecture. The original version just had every element pointing directly to the media element, and the controller cleaned up a lot. Highly recommend it, at least compared to what I was doing.
A video editor UI I think is natural extension of the Media Chrome suite. I'd love to hear what else might be helpful there if you want to post an issue in the repo.
I can deeply empathize with your hesitation to adopt something like media chrome based on future flexibility and size. I'll give you 3 points that would sell me on it. :) 1. You can only include the UI components you need, which is at least a major difference from other web video players when it comes to size. 2. We have some of the most experienced player devs working on it, including for things like accessibility and upcoming internationalization. 3. We're working hard to make it super configurable between slots, css parts, and css vars.
Of course we'll never beat the file size of completely custom software, but I feel like it'll come pretty close once all the basic features are built in.
Thanks for the heads up on the elements license!
Take over or create new open source projects so that every developer comes across your company in the search for a video package.
Another example I noticed recently is https://github.com/cookpete/react-player
Some of what you're seeing on the open source player front is that we already kind of have to support those projects anyway. We're player agnostic, so our customers use a lot of open source, including projects that aren't actively being maintained.
I think we're benefitting right now from being one of a very few dev-focused video companies that's also actively contributing to open source.
> a section on their site explaining how they are able to undercut everyone in the business and still keep going
This is great feedback that I'm putting on our todo list. We should absolutely have this.
We'll never put pricing out there that we can't handle with our economics, or at least have a clear path to supporting. All of our volume pricing is available publicly, so you should never be bait-and-switched if you're understanding concepts like credits. This is in contrast to some of our competitors that regularly surprise users with new pricing when they hit scale. I hate that so much.
Under the hood we use just-in-time encoding and other advanced optimizations that do give us an edge. Not to mention economies of scale. Writeup to come.
But a challenge comes in customer perception. Some of our customers understand encoding and it's cost, plus the benefits it brings like adaptive streaming and handling user-generated uploads. Many devs are new to video and expect it to cost the same as uploading an MP4 to S3. Some point to our competitors with no encoding costs, and some even point to Youtube as a reason why it should be cheaper. In the past Mux has been labeled as "the expensive option" because we charged for encoding, so we've been working on new pricing shape (some launched already, some to come) that allows you to come in at levels using less encoding that we can support economically, then elect higher levels of encoding costs/values when you understand if they're worth it to you.
We also think video should be more places than it is today, but video is inherently expensive in comparison to many other costs related to building an app, so we see it as our job to keep pushing costs down and shaping pricing so video is accessible to more use cases.
The on-demand (JIT) encoding is actual magic in how well it consistently works!
(I work at Mux)
If you don't mind sending a screenshot or other details to support@mux we'll figure out what's happening. Edge cases always seem to reveal themselves when someone else is looking at it.
When you click on the video itself, the left and right arrow keys work to scrub the video backwards and forwards. Up and down do nothing.
When you click on the scrubber, the left and right arrow keys stop working. Also, the up and down arrow keys start working to rewind/advance the video a different amount of time.
If you click in void space, e.g. on the Winamp example or the blue bar that looks like windows 98 on the Reelplay example - both of these controls stop working, as well as space to play/pause.
Latest chrome on macos.
The situation is a little complex with "hot keys" for controlling the video in general (after clicking on the video), accessibility controls for each component, and then general accessibility expectations for the whole page. For example, should we capture the up and down arrows to always control volume when the player is in focus, or should we not do that because people expect that for scrolling the page.
All that said, we definitely have some iteration ahead of us on this front so thanks again for the input.
In my last startup I started to build my own video.js theme, and after a few hours realized it probably wasn't worth my time and stuck with the defaults. Going forward these themes would give me a much better starting point to do something more custom.
Thanks for sharing!
controls=0 – Removes the player controls (like play, pause, volume). modestbranding=1 – Minimizes the YouTube logo in the player. rel=0 – Prevents showing related videos at the end (only works to show videos from the same channel). showinfo=0 – Removes the video title and uploader info (this parameter is deprecated but modestbranding should help). fs=0 – Disables the fullscreen button. iv_load_policy=3 – Hides video annotations (like pop-up notifications).
Then have your code detect for youtube embed urls and use a iframe to create the player (rather than a video tag). Finally map your player controls to the youtube embed api. Plyr.io have done something similar.
It may also mean a light framework on top of Web Components, but getting rid of all these dependencies and ever-changing framework is of course an old dream.
For everyone else, you start running into the issue of the classic https://xkcd.com/927/ situation. The problem of ever-changing frameworks will always be a constant. People want different things from their frameworks!
To give them some credit, I thought the multi-screen view they built across their players was pretty novel.
I wonder what would be the other uses of web components.
Practical case : at work we want to distribute a subsidies simulator. It's currently an iframe. What would be the advantages of distributing a web component instead of an iframe ?
A few advantages of web components if you don't need the security boundary of iframes: - Web components can naturally resize to their content where iframes can't. - Some page styles inherit, like `color`, `font-family` and all CSS custom properties, so they can look more integrated. - Web components can fire events. - Web components can have slots to project content from the use site into. - Web components are much lighter weight than iframes.
I think anything meant to be like a widget is a good fit. But an iframe you have the option of putting an app behind it while a web component is purely front end code. So maybe that’s a limitation for you. We at least plan to wrap iframes in web components for a nicer embed API.
Otherwise great project!
If you're seeing something weird around subtitle syntax then there's probably a documentation issue somewhere (or I'm misunderstanding your question). Subtitles themselves should work with a standard `<track>` in the media element, and the only other place we touch them is via the captions button/menu to toggle those tracks.
As for the synthax question, my point is that your script looks like this
<video
slot="media"
src="https://stream.mux.com/fXNzVtmtWuyz00xnSrJg4OJH6PyNo6D02UzmgeKGkP5YQ/low.mp4"
playsinline
crossorigin
></video>
<video slot="media" src="./video.mp4" crossOrigin playsInline>
<track label="English" kind="captions" srcLang="en" src="./captions.vtt"></track>
<track label="thumbnails" default kind="metadata" src="./thumbnails.vtt"></track>
</video>
And I just don't know how to interpolate the two
(Edit, checking further, I did manage to mix the two, and I can play subtitles over your demo video, but not over mine so I guess a foolproof sample in the wizard is probably needed :D )
One thing that I feel should be mandatory when building applications is setting: `user-select: none;` and only allowing it where it's needed. For example, the reelplay theme bar is selectable
Again, thank you for this wonderful work
If people actually like it we should take a performance pass. In our defense, we at least switched out the original bmp files from the first pass we took at hacking this together.
Its refreshing to see this kind of work being done. Right now all the framework authors are going berserk about web-components and spewing "th3y suCk" and "w3bcomp0ents are N0T th3 futUr3!". Just nonsense. WC allow better reusability than ANY react-like framework can, and are universal. You can do pretty much anything with them. The hype train right now seem to be on SSR, and its just mad, like WTF we had server side rendering since the 90s, and then it was all about SPA's, and now they want to basically reimplement PHP era websites with SSR, making you pretty much vendor locked in to nodejs.
I take a WC over a bloated npm installed react project with 2345 dependencies any day. A WC that works today WILL work just as good if not better in 2036. Can your react do that?