I love Flash-based video content. It’s lightweight, widely supported, and can do neat things like embed across sites and ping servers even when played locally. QuickTime is a venerable institution, and Windows Media Player has its fans (I guess), but the usability and functionality of web video took a huge leap with Flash Player 8. Still, there are a few features that I’d like to see become more universally implemented.
Jeroen Wijering’s Flash player (above) has a lot of these features without abandoning extant standards like SMIL, RTMP and ATOM, and the code is licensed under Creative Commons so it can be used non-commercially for free or licensed for a paltry €15.
- Closed captioning: This should be supported as a standard for so many reasons, starting with accessibility. Imagine YouTube clips failing gracefully into transcripts for text-based browsers, captions appearing when you muted the audio (great if you’re at the office), and a pop-up menu of alternate language subtitles. There are already standard timed-subtitle file formats for DVD video, and ReviewTube is a valiant effort, but if anything should be universally supported, this is it.
- Full-screen button on embeddable players: Sure, you can click for full-screen view on a clip’s home site, like at YouTube. But why not in-line full screen for embedded players? SplashCast has a neat implementation of this very feature, as does the Flash FLV Player I mentioned earlier.
- Boss button: Who hasn’t been at work, heard the boss coming and scrambled to alt-tab from a music video back to a boring spreadsheet. CBS is doing it for the NCAA’s, and combined with subtitling, it would vastly improve the experience for the average cube dweller. Flash can even track keystrokes, so there’s no reason a common hotkey combo couldn’t emerge across players.
- Easy access to FLV source: Right-click on a Flash area of your screen and the choices are less than entirely useful. Where’s ‘Save as,’ for instance? I know that part of the appeal to content types is that the Flash format is a proprietary one that serves as a thin layer of content protection. But why couldn’t people who want to leave their content open given the choice?
Even a custom button in the player itself that reads ‘save this video’ would be welcome. It’s not like eBaum’s World isn’t ripping off your content anyway, and it would probably save you some hotlinking bandwidth by encouraging people to mirror.
- Rolling playback: Quit asking me if I want to keep watching content, just play it already — though the more relevant, the better. This could work especially well if tied to the full screen feature. Let embedders or content creators compile a list of relevant clips to seed the initial playlist, and then let those roll after the first clip closes out if in full-screen mode.
I probably won’t even mind too much if you slip a short ad in between. Of course I can always just click stop or close the window. If you need buzzword reinforcement, wouldn’t this help with stickiness and findability?

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