Upgrade existing video player.

[Polytracker]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The existing video player is lacking in features and the styling is very basic. When sharing videos with clients it would be nice to have a better looking, and more feature rich video player.

Describe the solution you'd like
As far as I'm aware, the current video player is based on plyr.io The current plyr https://plyr.io/ - looks great and offers many more features:

• modern theme
• Thumbnail support
• markers
• captions
• quality selection

It would be great to be able to incorporate the newer plyr into viewer, (even if it's just the theming to start with) as this would really elevate the video viewing experience in Nextcloud.

[fugbixer]

true true true!!!

please add also playing multiple items in a row which got selected.

#1038 got ignored long enough....

these are quite important to convince more people that nextcloud is a great replacement for proprietary solutions.

[skjnldsv]

We are using the lastest plyr.io. We are not just basing our work on plyr, we're directly using it 😁
Latest viewer version uses plyr 3.6.8, which is just barely not up to date with latest version 3.7.2

EDIT: latest viewer actually uses latest plyr 3.7.2

If some features are missing, it's because they are just not integrated into Nextcloud :)
But, theoretically, could! 🚀

• Modern theme, we already are using the default with just the colour fitting your NC theming config
• Thumbnail support, we already have, just have an image file with the same name lying next to your video file.
• Markers, We could support, they should probably be in a dedicated json file next to your video. No idea if plyr can extract them from within your video file 🤔
• Captions, are stale in Add support for video captions #915
• Quality selection, is not possible as Nextcloud does not transcode your videos (you would need an external service, or to manually have each file next to each others in your folder, which we could support for sure)

[szaimen]

• Quality selection, is not possible as Nextcloud does not transcode your videos (you would need an external service, or to manually have each file next to each others in your folder, which we could support for sure)

It would maybe be possible if #1207 would be implemented but since this would be only client-side it would still need the same bandwidth so probably not really useful.

[skjnldsv]

Yeah, would defeat the purpose. Also won't change the load, rather making it worse as decoding a higher quality video is most likely less expensive than encoding to a lower quality (for rendering gain) 🙈

[MrRinkana]

The quality selection would be one of the best features if implemented! Doing it similarly to the thumbnail is the way to go, but I suggest with some changes:

• Allow the alternative videos (with different bit-rates/resolution) to be hidden. This is to allow the view of the folder to NOT become chaos if there are for example 3 alternative video files per original.. Actually, accepting hidden thumbnails is probably also nice for the same reason..
• Declare a naming convention, for example if the original is "video.mp4" accepted alternative resolutions/bitrates are (for example): ".720p_3Mbs_60fps-video.mp4", ".720p_1Mbs_30fps-video.mp4" or ".480p_500Kbs_30fps-video.mp4", or whatever would be a reasonable naming scheme.

Maybe the best way would be to look for a hidden folder with the same name as the video, containing both thumbnail and alternative qualities..

Independent on the details of implementation; this would allow the creation of an "extension" app that generates these different quality videos automatically, as I would consider this outside of the scope of the viewer app. I don't think this would be too hard, as it is practically the app "Automated media conversion" by Cameron Wilby but made specific for this purpose and that follows this declared naming-scheme. I have some ideas for such an app I could try to make a demo version of, but I don't have much time to do so so I can't promise anything.

The markers would also be awesome! Especially if they could be placed using the video player (i.e. people watching with write rights to directory could add markers during video play). I haven't understood if plyr supports chapters but with the above suggestion and this, nextcloud could provide an internal youtube-like alternative between friends, collages or whoever you are sharing videos with (group folders anyone?). I mean comments and tags are already supported by the files app.. Or maybe even public with public shares? How awesome would this be?

[Nocturna22]

#1524

[ohthehugemanatee]

#1207 we suggest either copying the implementation from Memories app (which bundles go-vod or lets you run it as an external service), or making it easy/possible to override the built-in handlers so that another App (memories or any other) could provide a transcoding video experience.