6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over

https://www.mux.com/blog/6-years-building-video-players-9-billion-requests-starting-over

by bolp • 6 months ago

40 22 6 months ago

dixie_land• 6 months ago

Great 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

VladVladikoff2• 6 months ago

Until recently HLS support was not great without a custom player. https://caniuse.com/http-live-streaming

pocksuppet• 6 months ago

Why not DASH?

zzo38computer2• 6 months ago

I wrote a program to record videos from HLS, including the option to avoid downloading commercial breaks. However, some things are still missing and/or might not work properly. (Some things, such as converting it to the DVD video format and then recording it onto a DVD, are done with separate programs and is out of scope of this one.)

fragmede• 6 months ago

I just want the OS native widget that allow me to play pause seek and maybe choose captions.

You're not asking for the OS native widget though, you're asking for Apple's native OS widget to support that. The problem is that makes it up to Apple to lift a finger to support it. And Apple does whatever it wants. Sometimes those things are aligned with you as a user, sometimes not. And yes, showing ads is one reason some parties have for this. The other large one though, is codec support. If you're not in the game, codec support seems like such an inconsequential detail that it can't possibly be the real issue, but with money on the line, it's a bigger deal than you'd thing.

The thing is, unless you get in the weeds, the codec support is paid for when you buy the hardware. You don't have to deal with it. But when you're not Mr. Beast, showing videos on the big platforms, you aren't making giant piles of money. Thus, you need to optimize smaller details to make smaller amounts of money.

Which codec is being used becomes material because you can save money there with encoding and you can save money with content delivery as well. It's just about money. So it's not (just) about ad blocking money; it's about content creation and distribution costs.

zzo38computer2• 6 months ago

I would want to use separate programs for displaying videos, whether or not the operating system includes them. Being able to play, pause, seek, set caption styles (including size, colour, and opacity), record it on a DVD, etc, would be helpful, but that can be whatever program you decide to use that has the features you wanted; whoever made the video or wants to send it to you should not need to care which of these features you are using (although they will need to include captions if you want them).

Dachande663• 6 months ago

I 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.

dceddia• 6 months ago

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.

TheAceOfHearts• 6 months ago

This 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.

bflesch• 6 months ago

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

vee-kay2• 6 months ago

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.

msp262• 6 months ago

Mildly 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.

Rodeoclash2• 6 months ago

I don't think it's possible with players like the one Mux uses (I assume is using the underlying video technology in the browser).

Some developments in this space over the past few years have been the ability to interact with the actual frames of video being rendered and to output those into a canvas tag. This is under the Web Codecs API.

For a while I was working on a video review tool for eSports teams which required the ability to have frame perfect annotations. I got around the inability to perfectly pause on the same frame by using screenshots of the video which were overlayed over the video but with the codecs API, you don't actually need this. It opens up all sorts of features like being able to play videos backwards for example.

Heff• 6 months ago

Video.js creator here, and I agree with this ^. Frame accurate seeking isn't something the native video element does.

Check out the Omakase player: https://player.byomakase.org/

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6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over

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