Bunny Blog

Every few months I – like every other living human – struggle through one of the eternal quandaries of our time: is there a worthwhile Flash video player out there for our own use?  I’ve asked this question of developers, media consumers, even the faces behind YouTube, Revver, etc… and I’m still not convinced I’ve ever gotten a good answer.

The problem is simple enough: we want to move away from Quicktime for serving our videos, since it has versioning and platform problems which Flash does not.  I know this.  I’ve known this for a long time.  And yet.

And yet I have yet to find a player that satisfies all (or even most) of the following criteria:

• support for widescreen and 4:3 formats - should automagically choose the correct aspect at runtime in the best case, or be able to do so with a query string in the worst case
• sizing up to 640px wide (most seem to cap out around 500px)
• dynamic sizing at runtime (ie, “Here’s a video, player, you figure out how big it should be displayed”)
• a simple, clean, elegant interface (Virb.com has a nice one; some of the Brightcove.com (not .tv) ones are nice as well)
• timeline scrubbing with a decent number of keyframes (YouTube seems to only keyframe about every 5 seconds on most videos, and that’s a shame)
• ability to share the video by generating emails and embed codes
• statistics tracking
• no watermark when displayed on our sites!  this is confusing to visitors and problematic to our branding.
• quality, quality, quality on the compression.  Yes, h264 is coming.  It’s not here yet.  Give me something good in the meantime.  (again, Virb and Brightcove seem to do a fairly good job in this area - Brightcove because they require you to do your own FLV compression in the first place, though)
• straightforward, fast, simple uploading procedures.  Flickr gets it right.  Is there a video site that does?
• options for monetizing would be nice, even if we’re not using them just yet

Am I being too demanding?  I don’t feel like I am.  I know that some of the features here are fairly sophisticated, and to be fair, our current Quicktime display doesn’t meet all of them, either.   But this is a field with a lot of competitors right now, and I can tell you that none of the players I’ve seen and considered using have satisfied more than half of this list.  That seems like a terrible oversight on the collective behalf of the video sites out there.  So listen up!  Show me a player that does what I want without being distracting, ugly, or annoying, and I’ll show you me using your player to publish our videos!