Options to disable the fastSeek

[amtins]

Videojs v7.9.0 introduced the fastSeek, it's a great feature. However, when a media has chapters, this results in starting the playback a few seconds before the beginning of the chapter. On our use case we had to do something like player.tech('Html5').el().fastSeek = undefined; to avoid having a weird behavior, which is a bit sad 😢

One could imagine having a property to disable the fastSeek like :

const player = new videojs('#p', {
  html5: {
    fastSeek : 'yes', 'no', 'never again', 'please NO', 'i don\'t know', 'why not' // true or false will do the trick too
  }
});

In the Html5 tech :

class Html5 extends Tech {
  constructor(player, options){
    //...
   const {fastSeek} = options;
   this.isFastSeekEnabled_ = fastSeek && this.el_.fastSeek && browser.IS_ANY_SAFARI;
  }
 // ...
  setCurrentTime(seconds) {
    try {
      if (this.isScrubbing_ && this.isFastSeekEnabled_) {
        this.el_.fastSeek(seconds);
      } else {
        this.el_.currentTime = seconds;
      }
    } catch (e) {
      log(e, 'Video is not ready. (Video.js)');
      // this.warning(VideoJS.warnings.videoNotReady);
    }
  }
}

[gkatsev]

I did recently fix it so that fastSeek is only used when dragging around in the progress bar and not just a regular click to seek: #7527

Is that sufficient for your needs?

[amtins]

@gkatsev thanks for your reply 👍. I actually saw the fix #7527 back when I wrote my proposal. However, we have a slightly more complex use case for legal reasons. We use middleware that takes care of blocking certain portions of a media when the user seeks which leads to unwanted effects.

More generally, having the ability to disable fastSeek would allow for a unified experience across all browsers where precision is prioritized over a fast seek a bit like the overrideNative.