Break.com’s Innovative New Video Player
Break.com, the male-specific video site, launched last night a new video player that incorporates a whole bunch of features we haven’t seen elsewhere. It’s perhaps too many features, but one or two of them will no doubt become industry standards.
The Video Player – Watch more free videos
The video demo, followed by fooling around with the player yourself, perhaps says it best, but here’s a breakdown.
- Clicking on the bottom right corner allows you to resize the player as a video is playing.
- You can also elect to center the player in the middle of your browser, make it full-screen, or bring it back to normal size while a video is playing.
- Clicking on the picture and dragging it right or left while the mouse is still pressed down grabs the video and fast-forwards or rewinds it.
- Controls for brightness, contrast, saturation, and smoothing can bump up and overlay the player.
- Slo-mo!
- Keyboard shortcuts — A for fullscreen, S for slow-mo, V for preferences, up and down for volume, right and left for fast-forward and rewind.
- If selected, a guide overlays the entire screen with more from this user, top-rated, most-viewed, and related video scrolling through. Now this is overkill.
Note: none of this functionality comes through in the embed — where it would perhaps do the most good, especially the recommendations part! — so it’s probably best to click through.
Market leader YouTube has also been working on its player lately.
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Very cool. I just wish they had a better terms of service for content creators. Maybe something like Revver would be good.
They did a pretty decent job knocking off the cooler interactions of the Brightcove player, but all the other useless crap and piss-poor design sort of ruins it.
I still like Vimeo for design and Blip.tv for functionality. Hands down. But they are undeniably cool new tools that I hope get adopted by other sites.
Alternatively, “Break.com’s breast-centric enhancement. Play around with the player, when you’re not playing around with yourself.”
pretty nice efforts for a website that prides itself on millisecond long clips “male-specific” audience humor..
now only if they would develop a technology to stop grossly inflating their view counts numbers…
i think it sucks. the simpler the better. i still prefer to download them myself with vidstealer.com
great blog i love
when i embedded a video to my web site, the full screen button does not appear.may i change the code and add this function?
Their player is still terrible and the keyboard shortcuts don’t work, fullscreen is several clicks away (more than one is too many really) and it re-buffers when embedded. And yes, when embedded, they take away from fullscreen all together.
@john is right, simpler the better.
Just terrible.