It seems Youtube has finally updated their player design for the first time since June of 2007. This move was long overdue, and the change is very welcome.

New Player Design

In terms of the aesthetics, Youtube has done quite a few things to improve their player. Squared off corners are more modern, the whole rounded corners movement has pretty much died out (observe the Adobe icons these days – kind of ironic that the moment we got rounded corners in CSS and 9-slice scaling in flash the whole fad died).

Strong use of icons help to create user conventions in the design. It is not at all hard to know where to click, and most rollovers and clicks come with a very nice feedback mechanism that gives a tactile sense to the experience. I’m particularly delighted with the volume control, that slides out like a tile with a satisfying speed and is easier to grab and manipulate.

The progress bar is a big improvement. While the user is interacting, it gets thicker to provide more visible area. Without interaction, it shrinks away nicely, tucking itself close to the bottom to provide progress information without distracting from the video itself. As a nice little touch, the progress thumb itself does a little expand-contract pop as yet another feedback mechanism for user interaction.

The quality of the video is higher as well. Some of my already uploaded videos show at better image quality, up to 1080p and that was a very nice thing for youtube to do that must have cost them in terms of encoding bandwidth. I do find that audio often encodes quite poorly, but I’m aware of the challenges involved in properly encoding audio server-side. Computers don’t listen to the sound, they just perform math on it.

No Embedding Yet

Thus far, it does not seem possible to embed the new Youtube player outside of Youtube. Not sure exactly why that would be other than perhaps they are taking a page from Facebook, which allows you to embed video outside of Facebook but not at the highest quality. For the full quality you have to link back to their site. This no doubt cuts down on server load and also helps to drive traffic.

A quick look at the embed code being used shows a few improvements, such as proper closing xhtml-like parameters. Strangely they don’t show up in the code if you use the right-click (context menu) method to grab embed code. That’s a small point.

I would also like to see the options for customization beefed up a bit. But this is definitely a step in the right direction!