Early Min Vid Survey Feedback and Next Steps

Archives Test Pilot/Min Vid
#1

We collect feedback on Test Pilot experiments in three main ways:

  1. If a user clicks the ‘give feedback’ button on an experiment’s details page
  2. If a user disables an experiment
  3. We solicit feedback at organically at intervals while an experiment is being used.

We’re still waiting for data on organic feedback, but here’s what we’re seeing so far from other feedback channels.

All
Most users report using Min Vid for many types of videos, but specific use-cases include music, game streams, and lectures/tech talks

Give Feedback
~77% of users claim to have used Min Vid successfully
~14% of users couldn’t get Min Vid to work

Disable
The plurality of users filled in an “other” reason why they disabled Min Vid; the main reasons appear to be:

  • User Experience issues
  • Performance issues, esp slowing or crashing Firefox
    ** ~60% of users claim to have used Min Vid successfully
    ** ~17% of users couldn’t get Min Vid to work

Conclusions and Next Steps

So what does this tell us? Well, performance and stability are definitely still issues on Min Vid. We’re busy switching from an add-on SDK panel (translation: old, kind-of janky windowing) to a more stable windowing solution, so hopefully that will resolve a great deal of these issues. Presumably, switching to this new system would also make scaling videos a thing.

The commonly reported use case of playing music suggests an avenue for expanding the product, namely adding playlists to Min Vid. It would be great to go to YouTube or SoundCloud, queue up a bunch of music and let it play with a minimized Min Vid player. What do you think?

#2

Being able to send full YouTube playlists or Vimeo albums to a min-vid queue would be great!

#3

This opinion has already been shared in the Reddit thread, so I will take the liberty to copy paste it here:

As it was implemented last time I tested it, is decent enough. However it will not go beyond that for the main reason that it depends on embedded players to make it work (again, it was like that last time I tried, don’t know if it changed since then).

There are many problems with this, so I will focus just on the big one: In case of YouTube, any video that has embedding disabled will never work in the mini vid window. Right there the add-on has lost its purpose for those videos.I would highly suggest to rethink the current method and try to do something like Opera’s PIP.

I don’t know how they are doing it, but if I had to do it I would “mirror” the video to the dedicated pop-up (video to canvas extraction, CSS element duplication, etc.), echo mouse clicks (so custom controls can be used from that window) and duplicate the basic video controls when needed (play, pause, volume, seek, fullscreen).

Doing that way would allow the add-on to overcome all the problems the current method has (had?), would not cause re-buffering, would allow playlists to keep working and many other benefits.

The only thing I don’t know is if any downsides that this way might have are enough to not justify its benefits, but even then I am certain Mozilla would be able to accommodate a dedicated api just for this purpose.

This is just my opinion which I thought I would share in case it might help things improve.

#4

It would be great if Min Vid would support sites like http://plug.dj that play one piece of media, and then change automatically to another piece of media.

Currently the player will just play the first media piece it encounters instead of changing to the next item after the first is over or skipped.

Not sure if this should be done for a browser tab or a static URL. (Doing it for a tab would work for YouTube playlists; because after a video changes, the URL also changes.)

#5

I watch talking videos rather than music videos. I tend not to queue videos. I pick videos from the recommended list after they are played. If Min Vid could show recommendations in the Min Vid canvas, then I could browse videos without having to go back to the YouTube tab every few minutes.

#6