A quick programming note – I know it’s not Friday, but I forgot to hit “Publish” on this one on Friday before I left for the weekend, and since I’m probably not going to do a Friday post over the holiday weekend, I’m splitting the difference and officially declaring it Free Idea Tuesday Evening, though I’m keeping the title the same, just because. Also, I’m not numbering Free Idea Friday (for example, “Free Idea Friday 6 – A better video slider”) any more because: 1. I have a hard time keeping track of what number I’m on, and 3. I don’t think it adds anything to number them. Cries of anguish over the change shall be heartily ignored. Anyway, the post:
This one is more of a request than an idea. So, the problem I would like to see solved is to have a better time / location slider in media players. Most media players have at least figured out that the slider that shows how far in to a movie you are should go across the bottom, and span the entire width of the video. This in and of itself is a huge improvement over the ones that have a fixed width slider that doesn’t expand when you resize the player. The problem is that on really long videos (a 2 hour movie for instance) it’s still very hard to do a fine grain adjustment with the existing sliders. For instance, if you’re 1 hour 23 minutes and 8 seconds into the movie, it’s hard to go back to 1 hour 23 minutes and 4 seconds just to catch that last word again- a single pixel is already a few seconds long so it’s extremely hard to move the mouse a single pixel with any accuracy. So, I would like to see some mechanism to use the mouse for both fine and course gain position adjustments in the same control.
The best idea I’ve come up with (and it could probably use improvement) is to make it so the area right around the current location in the clip is warped, so that if you adjust it just a pixel or two in one direction, that pixel is only worth a second or two, but if you move it 100 pixels, it’s worth far more than 100 seconds. That would let you make fine grain adjustments more easily while still allowing large leaps in the same interface, and showing about where you are in the clip. More of a logarithmic scale than a linear one (I think). I’m not sure if setting it up this way would make it more or less intuitive. I think the warping would also have to interplay a bit with how quickly you move the slider.
So, using VLC‘s slider for mock ups, the slider normally looks like this:
In my idea, when you click on the slider, it would bow out like this:
And if you move it just a little, it would only move the media a second or two, but quickly moving it past the bowed part would move it much further, at which point the new location would bow out. To show the scale, if you added ticks, each showing an equal amount of time in the video/audio clip:
Or, to illustrate a little better, zoomed in, with 3 equal sections shown, with the assumption that each tick in the bowed section is one second, and outside the bowed section, each pixel is one second:
The length would still have to vary some depending on the length of the clip, or you could vary how large of an area is bowed out. A little hard to explain clearly, but I think it would be fairly intuitive once you got it working.