Oh boy, I could write a book in response to this...
> a section on their site explaining how they are able to undercut everyone in the business and still keep going
This is great feedback that I'm putting on our todo list. We should absolutely have this.
We'll never put pricing out there that we can't handle with our economics, or at least have a clear path to supporting. All of our volume pricing is available publicly, so you should never be bait-and-switched if you're understanding concepts like credits. This is in contrast to some of our competitors that regularly surprise users with new pricing when they hit scale. I hate that so much.
Under the hood we use just-in-time encoding and other advanced optimizations that do give us an edge. Not to mention economies of scale. Writeup to come.
But a challenge comes in customer perception. Some of our customers understand encoding and it's cost, plus the benefits it brings like adaptive streaming and handling user-generated uploads. Many devs are new to video and expect it to cost the same as uploading an MP4 to S3. Some point to our competitors with no encoding costs, and some even point to Youtube as a reason why it should be cheaper. In the past Mux has been labeled as "the expensive option" because we charged for encoding, so we've been working on new pricing shape (some launched already, some to come) that allows you to come in at levels using less encoding that we can support economically, then elect higher levels of encoding costs/values when you understand if they're worth it to you.
We also think video should be more places than it is today, but video is inherently expensive in comparison to many other costs related to building an app, so we see it as our job to keep pushing costs down and shaping pricing so video is accessible to more use cases.
Thank you! Winamp is getting a lot of love (and controversy) right now so it felt worth calling out. But it's not my favorite of the themes in practice. I think that's Sutro, which kind of surprised us by how nice it turned out.
Fully flexible color choice is a foot gun. I've definitely made some very ugly themes with that too. The goal is to have very many themes here, including user-submitted ones, so it might be hard to create something that can warn about issues across all of them. But seeing as we have pretty clear foreground and background color settings with primary/secondary I bet we could make something helpful.
Anything frame-accurate or smooth scrubbing has always been a challenge with he abstraction level of the video element.
I don't have an exact answer from you, but you might look around the web codecs space, where more performant examples are being built at a lower level. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebCodecs_A...
That's a really nice implementation. I feel like it should be easy for that to support videos too, if desired. I assume it's just using a media element under the hood.
The situation is a little complex with "hot keys" for controlling the video in general (after clicking on the video), accessibility controls for each component, and then general accessibility expectations for the whole page. For example, should we capture the up and down arrows to always control volume when the player is in focus, or should we not do that because people expect that for scrolling the page.
All that said, we definitely have some iteration ahead of us on this front so thanks again for the input.
Check out the Omakase player: https://player.byomakase.org/
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