Posts Tagged ‘player’

Unified API: Flash and HTML5, in beautiful harmony

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

In ancient times, a.k.a. about a month ago, Wistia’s Player API (and all associated documentation) basically controlled the Flash side of the player, without really allowing much control on the HTML5 side. Since we’re all about making sure your video plays right everywhere — including the mobile devices where HTML5 video is a necessity — this could not go on forever. So we’re happy to announce our new Unified Player API, which just works, regardless of whether your audience is viewing your video in Flash or HTML5.

The new Player API places a new layer of abstraction on top of the player, creating a true Wistia API that eliminates the annoying little details that used to catch people up (for instance, you couldn’t instantaneously issue commands to the Javascript API, you had to wait for it to initiate). With the new API:

  • No more polling the video! The unified API supports video events like play/pause/ended/timechange on both Flash and HTML5.
  • You don’t have to worry about what’s going on under the hood, just tell the player what to do and we’ll take care of the rest!

We’re excited to have a Unified Flash/HTML5 interface and we think it’ll make everyone’s lives a whole lot easier. To learn more, read the new Player API documentation. Combined with our recent new customizable player, Matador,  and SuperEmbeds that make customization even easier, you have more control over your videos than ever.

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The HD button is dead. Long live HD!

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

The HD button, much like time, race, gender, and beauty, is an arbitrary construct. That’s not to say it was never a good idea — but it’s something that became prevalent early in the days of web video and eventually became convention despite not necessarily being the best way to do things. Web video really got started on YouTube, and early gripes were mainly about the 240p quality of the videos hosted. Vimeo stepped in, with their main selling point being higher quality than the competition via providing an HD button to click for higher resolution video. This works fine for higher connections, but causes problems for a lot of users.

That’s why our philosophy is to provide the best experience at all times and not have to think about it. Most embeds on pages are less than 640 pixels wide. HD encodes are 1280 x 720 or greater. When an HD encode is viewed inline, it’s using three times the bandwidth as the computer downloads the HD stream, leading to choppiness and other negative effects (and there are starving children who could eat that bandwidth!). That’s why we created our new Auto HD feature. When you’re watching a video inline in our player, it will display at the best perceivable quality, measuring how fast you’re downloading; when you fullscreen the video, if your bandwidth can handle it, it will switch to an HD encode where it matters.

Video on your website should be all about user experience and your message. If the viewer doesn’t get the message, then the quality of the video doesn’t matter — they won’t hear what you’re saying and you’ve lost a potential conversion (particularly important for business video).

Basically, we can view the problem on two axes: one ranging from SD (standard definition) to HD (high definition) video, and the other ranging from inadequate bandwidth to adequate bandwidth. For the SD group, the button is just clutter. This applies to more than just people viewing a video without adequate bandwidth for HD: it can also mean people viewing the video as a smaller inline embed or people who aren’t really watching the video for image so much as they’re watching it for message. Then, there are those who hit the button but don’t have adequate bandwidth to support HD video. For them, it can ruin the experience — like a mouse expecting a treat and instead receiving a slowly buffered, annoying electric shock.

Based on what we’ve measured, over 1/3 of viewers still don’t have the bandwidth to support HD. The first image that this may conjure is one of slackjawed hillbillies jamming out to the chiptune beats of their dial-up modems, but they’re not the only ones. Some other examples — a few of many — include: an office sharing a cable modem, users sharing a connection in a café, places where IT throttles traffic, or DSL connections that can’t support the bandwidth. For people who can’t load video smoothly, the viewing experience is awful and the message is lost.

We <3 HD video in the right time and place, but that time and place is limited. With Auto HD, we think about deliverability for you so you can focus on making your video amazing.

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Introducing Wistia’s new player!

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011


We’re super excited to announce the release of the new Wistia player, Matador! Here’s the philosophy behind our player: your viewers’ focus should be on your content, not on our player. That’s always been our ideology, plain and simple. Matador stays out of the way. With this in mind, we’ve meticulously redesigned our player from the ground up.Here are the most significant new features of the player:

  • Auto HD: HD content is automatically shown to viewers when the size of the player and their connection speed can handle it. When they can’t support the bandwidth, the SD version of the video is displayed, without any extra effort on your part! HD videos are sexy and we’re huge fans. But any benefits of slick HD content are negated if 30% of your audience closes the video immediately because their connection results in annoying buffering. Even worse, if the video is embedded in a small rectangle on your site, your viewers get buffering without any visible improvement in video quality between HD and SD. And so, we built Auto HD.
  • Color customization: Change the color to make the player blend in or stand out! We used some advanced color math to make it so any color you choose looks great. We stand by the idea that the player should stay out of the way to let your content shine, which can be challenging to incorporate with color customization, but we think we’ve found a way to incorporate player “theming” without being tacky.
  • Enable/Disable Individual Controls: You can turn on and off the volume control, fullscreen button, play/pause button, and even the playbar itself! Be as minimal as you want to be. We know that some video content requires all sorts of control and other content might just call for one click of the player to get the video rolling. Now, it’s up to you how much control you want to offer your viewers.
Scroll over this demo to compare the new and old players:

And here are some more subtle differences that we think make our player the best it can be:

  • No More Volume Control by Default: Nearly every computer that ships nowadays has volume control buttons on the keyboard. Why clutter the player with another volume control? So now, volume control is off by default on our player (but we understand there are situations where you need volume in the play, so you can just tick a box and enable it).
  • Only slightly taller controls (32 vs. 29 px), but much bigger click zones: The previous player was minimal and stayed out of the way, so we kept that experience, but updated the look and made the click zones much larger (i.e.  much easier to scrub, click play, pause, etc.) We know it’s very annoying when other players have small click handles for controls, and we didn’t want to fall into that category.
  • Keeps the stripes but updates them for a more modern look: We wanted to keep that Wistia look that people know and love, but update it. The stripes in the bar are our signature look, but were looking a bit stale, so we refreshed that and made it awesome.
  • Show the length of the video before you start it in the control bar: Clutch.
  • Warmer default color: The default color for the player is no longer completely grey, but a desaturated yellow, like the Wistia app and homepage. We’ve added a slight warmth to it.
  • Space bar to play/pause the video: Okay, this is something nearly every other player has and we didn’t. We’re sorry. Now it’s there.
To get the new player, click on the “Account” tab in your account and click the “Get the new player!” link on the bottom right.

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