VideoPress: removing dark overlay?
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That’s great. I could also imagine that a non-darkened player design could boost its usage, because right now I see the standard videopress player hardly anywhere on the web. I even know folks on a wp.com business plan who nevertheless use the standard html5 player, despite its inferior functionalities.
One last suggestion: when choosing the premium plan, it says you get a ‘customizable player with rich stats’ (see tooltip here: https://wordpress.com/pricing/)
However, as we’ve just found out, you can’t actually customize the VideoPress player on a Premium Plan, due to the iframe blocking CSS access. In the same vein, “Advanced Design Customization” apparently doesn’t mean ‘complete control over website CSS’ (see tooltip).
Anyway, thanks to everybody for your responses and much appreciated help!
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Some final, elegant video player examples of major newspapers:
The NYT video gallery. Imagine all of these thumbnails being dark. No way. http://www.nytimes.com/video
Or the current NYT startpage with an embedded video at the top. A dark overlay would literally destroy the page layout. On hover, the play icon changes subtly. https://imgur.com/a/ArqyP
(I noticed this myself: if the video is part of your startpage design, the dark overlay is even worse than if the video appears somewhere down in an article.)
The Washington Post with a video on their startpage, top right. The inverted play button gets slightly darker on hovering over the video: https://imgur.com/a/9TN5Y
Or the TIME magazine, using a video as the ‘featured image’ of their article. A dark overlay over your featured image? No thanks. The play icon turns TIME-red on hover, as a VideoPress play icon could turn WP-blue. https://imgur.com/a/ltiyT
(Moreover, if in some case you actually do want a dark video thumbnail/still image, you could simply add one.)
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Can’t control CSS in iframe at this point, but VideoPress has several customization options. Perhaps we’ll suggest the ability to control it with separate CSS.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback. I’ve linked to this thread in the notes I passed to developers.
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Thanks. I gave this lengthy feedback just because I believe WordPress is a truly exceptional company that is going to be absolutely vital for the future of the internet – including, perhaps, online video, given the increasingly troubling developments over at youtube (and facebook).
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Fun fact: apparently not even WordPress is using the Videopress player on its own website, but instead non-listed Youtube embeds :-))
=> https://en.support.wordpress.com/simple-payments/
Gotcha! :-)
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(on a more philosphical note, I’d claim that putting a dark overlay between the publisher’s content and the audience – just to flatter the play icon – is actually against core WP philosphy. At any rate, it’s not exactly ‘letting the content shine’ => https://en.support.wordpress.com/videopress/) :-)
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one more Idea: in case you decide to make the Videopress player accessible via CSS (currently blocked by the iframe), users could of course change the standard color and opacity of the play icon anyway, depending on their video thumbnail or theme design. This would further reduce the need for a mandatory dark overlay.
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This thread has been recorded, so all of your updates will stay linked here when a developer takes a look. Don’t hold your breath though, it won’t happen soon.
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no worries, I canceled my Premium plans already because the VP player without CSS access is not really what I expected (even though quite functional). But I’m sure an updated version could boost its popularity.
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