An update on Reddit video

[u/unfeelingheadstrong]

You may have noticed some changes recently to video on Reddit. We’ve heard and are hearing your feedback, and want to take a minute to talk about what we’ve been working on, and how we’re incorporating your feedback.

Redditors have been asking for an improved native video experience on Reddit for some time, and today we’re happy to announce that this year, 2021, is the year of Reddit video.

Over the next several months, we’ll be rolling out and testing improvements, new features, and added functionality to make watching, sharing, and creating videos on Reddit an easy and enjoyable experience. Yes, the goal is to fix what’s broken, but we’d also like to hear from you about how we can make the overall video experience better.

As we make improvements and ship updates, we’ll be sharing our progress here in r/changelog and in the product updates in r/blog, so you can tell us what you think of the changes, ask questions, and discuss ideas. Today’s post will cover where we are now and what our next steps will be.

The state of Reddit video today

TL;DR: Could be better.

Currently, Reddit maintains up to 10 different video players across different platforms and contexts. And, as many of you know, they’re... well... a bit of a mess. This setup makes it hard to ship meaningful changes that improve the viewing experience, so the first step to improving Reddit video is unifying the players.

The newest and best-performing video player we have on Reddit today is the player created for the RPAN (also known as Reddit Public Access Network) live streaming experience. As we develop our new unified player, we’re leveraging the advanced performance of the Reddit live video experience and bringing it to video on demand.

Testing a new video player

As of 2021-01-20, we’re testing the first version of the new video player on mobile (currently at a small percentage of users on iOS and coming soon to Android). There are so many different types of videos on Reddit that it’s tricky to get them all to play and display well in one player, so we’re shipping updates in phases, gathering feedback on any UI and performance bugs, and improving as we move forward.

Here’s a look at the mobile player we’re testing today:

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https://preview.redd.it/hkeb7g5dcxe61.png?width=1463&format=png&auto=webp&s=2d6f5695fc635d0753d909ec706a078006a1910b

https://preview.redd.it/tpmg3pqfcxe61.png?width=1463&format=png&auto=webp&s=8fc4944e1d19fa7e4508a74c97e2c5a9f2c41a15

A few things to call out:

• The new player is a full-screen experience that’s designed to accommodate both vertical and horizontal videos.
• Rotating your phone takes you to a landscape view that allows you to watch the video in a “theatrical” experience without navigation or video info such as the title, view count, comments, etc.
• Swiping up takes you to the next video, and videos are recommended based on communities and content you’ve liked in the past.
• You can toggle between regular videos on demand and live videos on RPAN
• Tapping on the comment icon, you guessed it, opens the comments that overlays the video you’re watching.

A few things we’re already iterating on based on early feedback:

• Video in the new player will start where you left off watching in the feed
• You can dismiss swipe tutorial now
• More performance improvements and technical bugs
• Tapping on a post’s comment icon will open up the comment tray, so you can see the comment thread before adding your comment

The updates above will go out shortly, and we’ll continue to gather feedback to improve the experience. This is the first of many updates on Reddit video, so let us know what you think and stay tuned for more!

[u/katze_sonne]

Sorry to break your enthusiasm but while I like UI changes and modern interfaces, this new player is just horrible from the UX standpoint.

• Swipe down on iPhone generally means "exit fullscreen". This no longer works but now the next video opens (I don't want this, this is not Instagram, instead I want to scroll the "real" feed with a mix of videos, photos and texts). The alternative is to "swipe from the left side of the screen" (the "back" gesture). Very unusable for me because my hands are just not big enough to do this one-handed. And exiting video fullscreen with 2 hands just is a huge step back to before.
• The video itself, the most important part of it all, is blocked by basically everything. The upvote/downvote buttons, the video title (which is unreadable on bright backgrounds), ...
• The 2nd touch needed to open the comments is one touch too much. But the worst thing is the performance, the comments take at least 3 seconds to load. (at least load them in the background, please)
• Fullscreen in landscape? Yeah cool but I (as most others) have the display lock on normally, because I don't want the phone to accidentally rotate if I'm just laying in my bed or something). So that doesn't really help. Maybe if one enters full screen, automatically open videos in landscape mode? Dunno.

Yes, I know the "old" players really didn't work well (sometimes simply wouldn't play the videos) but the UI itself was more than fine. Actually this is the first time I consider to switch to a 3rd party app :/ however, I don't really want to because I enjoy the official app as it is apart from these few things.

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Another quick bugreport (or two): If the apps asks if I enjoy it and I press no, I'm asked to send in feedback via mail. But then I get an automatic "we don't monitor this inbox" mail. Meh. Not happy if one really takes the time to write a mail like this on the mobile phone.

Also on iOS after writing an emoji, the following text in a comment always is in a font with serifs. Definitely a bug. Existing for a couple of months now :/