Optional in-app video player!

[cal2195]

Although one of VHA's strengths is "do one thing, and do it well", leaving you to choose your own video player, it would be nice to have an optional in-app video player.

While it wouldn't be able to play everything, as HTML5 only supports certain codecs in Chromium, I think it would be able to play the most common formats at least. We could fallback to the normal player if it doesn't support it.

One major advantage to doing this would be we could implement a "filmstrip timeline" by reusing the film strip, and allowing you to click on it to jump to that timestamp in the video!

I'd appreciate your thoughts on this, and if you think it's a good idea, any implementation ideas too - new window vs. tabbed, etc. 😄

[whyboris]

I'm open to further improvements like this to the app in the future.

Because this feature would be rather large, I wouldn't want to put it into version 2.0.0 - though I'm open to it in the future 👍

I particularly like the jump to particular spot in the video idea 🎉

[cal2195]

Good stuff! 👍 I'll make some more milestones for organisation!

In a similar vein, along with the strip beneath the video, it would be very cool to use the filmstrip thumbnails, and organise them like this for an overview to skip into the video as well! It would make great use of having 15+ thumbnails generated!

[whyboris]

I literally woke up with the same idea today 🎉
Now that filmstrip works well, we can just tile several filmstrips (copies of each file) with a different offset to create a single sheet (it wouldn't interact in any way with the mouse-over).

It may require a bit of care as we'll eventually (soon?) have variable lengths coming in (number of screenshots will depend on video length).

Feel free to call dibs on this new view, else I'll code it up 👍

[cal2195]

I'll have a go at this view! 👍

[cal2195]

Just an update from my personal interest in this issue:

I've managed to implement an in-app video player, in it's own BrowserWindow and it's very cool! Currently, MP4 files work perfectly, and I've implemented seeking using the sheet overview! 🎉
Super cool with the video on one monitor, and the sheet on another to seek around! 👍 I also noticed #133 while doing this!

Secondly, to support all file formats, I've implemented on-the-fly transcoding with ffmpeg and an express server in the app! 💯 It works very well, so all that's needed is a custom video player UI to support seeking! 🎉

(This isn't planned for 2.0.0, but I find it fun and challenging! 👍)

[whyboris]

Really cool! I'm not opposed to any of this to be in the app - after all - these are just extra options users can use 👍

[cal2195]

Additional idea that has come to me - since I'm implementing transcoding, this would allow the option of hosting the app remotely (like the demo online you had) and actually being able to stream the content via the transcoded stream! 💡

[whyboris]

That is really cool! 😲