As I’m sure most of you do, I am spending more and more time online watching video.  So I thought I would take some time and rate the various video players I use on a frequent basis.
I’m using a 10 point scale, and I’m rating based on a both functionality and visual look and feel.

ESPN.com 7 out of 10
Fairly simple, two color, semi transparent control bar, appears only when moused over–a design pattern I’m seeing more and more lately.  It’s there when you need it, it shows you what you want and it gets out of the way quickly.  It’s got a single play/pause button, a timer, a playback countdown, a volume control which displays only on mouseover, reducing clutter, and a menu which when clicked brings up some additional options for embedding sharing and the like.  A nice touch: Mouse over any point on the timer and you get a little tooltip that displays the time at that point.  Another nice touch: the small (no morethan 10 pixels vertical) bar at the bottom which displays how much has already played as a portion of the total.

Youtube 7 out of 10
Gets the job done.  Period.  Simple consistent interface.  Youtube also allows publishers to add annotations and captions to their videos, and naturally allows viewers to turn either on or off, with a simple hover menu at the very right side of the control bar.  Youtube is actually doing some really cool stuff to allow publishers to make their videos more interactive, including adding hyperlinks within a movie.  The evolution of online video will be interesting to watch (and maybe take part in) but that discussion is beyond the scope of this post.

NYtimes.com 6 out of 10
Elegant interface, but could be better.  The control bar stays present throughout the video playback, and occupies a significant portion of the total video player.  However its muted style–3 shades of grey–makes it easily ignored when not needed.  The playback control is done superbly.  When moused over, a small draggable button smoothly and elegantly appears, it’s affordance as a scroll mechanism to move to any point in the video is crystal clear.  The volume control is nice and large, with the same measure of affordance, however it looks like it was designed separately, as it doesn’t conform to the rest
of the control bar’s aesthetic.  Also, I may be nit-picky, and I’m sure this won’t bother 99% of nytimes.com viewers, but there’s a large empty space in between the play button on the left, and the full screen button
on the right, creating an odd asymmetry which, the more I look at it, the more it bothers me.

MTV.com 6 out of 10
Nice minimalist design.  Allows you to change the video quality during playback.  Also nice, allows you to choose from 3 sizes; standard, large and full screen.

Viddler.com 6 out of 10
Lets the video publisher skin the player interface.  This great tools allows users to comment on and tag the video in the timeline.  The interface is ugly, though, and some of the buttons aren’t self explanatory, nor do any of the buttons have tooltips.  At the end of the current video it automatically plays the next video, whereas most other players present a menu of videos to choose from.

MSNBC.com 5 out of 10
Slick looking.  I like the fact that the playback bar is given the entire width of the video, allowing the viewer to be more precise in navigating to a specific point in the video.  The other controls are slightly confusing.  It looks like the interface was over designed.

Virb.com 5 out of 10

Beautifully minimalist design.  No full screen mode, but it does have a cool feature that “turns off the lights” on the rest of the page.
Facebook 5 out of 10
Fairly simple interface.  Standard controls, done adequately.  Its got none of the useful social media features of Youtube. No ability to tag or comment in the timeline.  Pretty basic for such an important part of such an important website.

Metacafe 3 out of 10
Poorly designed.  It’s distracting when trying to watch video, and ugly to look at when interacting with.  The big blue shiny play and stop buttons look unprofessional, and why is there even a stop button.  The draggable playback scroll mechanism moves from left to right as the video plays, but it could have been made much more subtle.   There’s no need to see it unless you want to move navigate the video.  And why does the entire playback bar glow when I mouse over it?  Also not cool is the visually loud menu underneath the control bar.

As with any list, much o this is subjective.  I’m looking forward to hearing your opinions.  Also, there are so many web video players out there, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Let me know which ones you find especially appealing, or truly horrible.

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