6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over

Dachande663 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I want to like Mux. We use Mux. But everything feels half done.

- No 2FA support, at all. Support says it's not on their roadmap. Not acceptable in 2026.

- Editing subtitles requires a series of API calls, meaning I had to make a mini editor for our staff to change a word.

- Same with editing anything really. Playback restrictions, glossaries etc. There's no UI for doing it in-app. I understand that the majority of traffic is via the API, but having nothing in-app feels like an omission rather than a choice.

- Every video has multiple keys; uploads, assets, playbacks. And it's a pain moving from one to another.

Overall we use them, but I wouldn't choose to use them again.

	▲	dceddia an hour ago \| parent [-]
		With their tagline being “video for developers”, isn’t this their whole thing? It seems like another service would be a better fit if having a management UI is a requirement.

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dixie_land 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great engineering work but as a user I don't get why we need these: I just want the OS native widget that allow me to play pause seek and maybe choose captions. Especially on iOS 99% of these web players behaves awkwardly when you tried to pinch to zoom to full screen (usually it zooms the whole webpage, iOS native player just works)

The main incentive to have these custom controls I see is anti adblocking

	▲	VladVladikoff 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Until recently HLS support was not great without a custom player. https://caniuse.com/http-live-streaming

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TheAceOfHearts an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This post just makes me reflect on the sad state of the web and how it continues growing its own little silos that don't integrate with native applications. Actually, I already have the perfect video player (mpv) and I should be able to use that for everything. The dream of the user-agent continues dying: just to show you a few more ads, just for a designer to pad their portfolio with another video player design, just to create redundant work so programmers can keep their six figure jobs.

Note how the author in detailing their 6-year journey only focuses on their customers without any care for the actual end-users that have to engage with these tools in their final form.

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bflesch an hour ago | parent [-]

This problem needs to be addressed at an operating system level. Websites should be reduced to (paid-for) content providers.

Current situation around ad-blocking is just symptom of the problem. Users try to extract value from the website they are presented with and websites try to hook users into their platform without chance to leave.

The good thing it is only software

	▲	vee-kay an hour ago \| parent [-]
		All the major newspapers (e.g., WSJ) and magazines (e.g., NatGeo) of the world have already transitioned to online subscription model. Guess whether their reader base has increased or decreased from their heydays. Most newspapers or magazines have reduced or stopped their print editions. Subscription model works only for niche audience, willing to pay for the premium content and premium experience. Rest of the audience will not pay a penny - they are okay to use the site if it is free but with ads, and many users will use some adblocker, but if site refuses to show content if it detects adblocker, they will simply go elsewhere rather than paying for a subscription.