6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over

This post just makes me reflect on the sad state of the web and how it continues growing its own little silos that don't integrate with native applications. Actually, I already have the perfect video player (mpv) and I should be able to use that for everything. The dream of the user-agent continues dying: just to show you a few more ads, just for a designer to pad their portfolio with another video player design, just to create redundant work so programmers can keep their six figure jobs.

Note how the author in detailing their 6-year journey only focuses on their customers without any care for the actual end-users that have to engage with these tools in their final form.

Great engineering work but as a user I don't get why we need these: I just want the OS native widget that allow me to play pause seek and maybe choose captions. Especially on iOS 99% of these web players behaves awkwardly when you tried to pinch to zoom to full screen (usually it zooms the whole webpage, iOS native player just works)

The main incentive to have these custom controls I see is anti adblocking

I want to like Mux. We use Mux. But everything feels half done.

- No 2FA support, at all. Support says it's not on their roadmap. Not acceptable in 2026.

- Editing subtitles requires a series of API calls, meaning I had to make a mini editor for our staff to change a word.

- Same with editing anything really. Playback restrictions, glossaries etc. There's no UI for doing it in-app. I understand that the majority of traffic is via the API, but having nothing in-app feels like an omission rather than a choice.

- Every video has multiple keys; uploads, assets, playbacks. And it's a pain moving from one to another.

Overall we use them, but I wouldn't choose to use them again.

Mildly related question for the people in the thread:

How do I seek to the exact first frame of a timestamp with mux? I've tried a few things but it seems to always go to the nearest keyframe rather than the first frame at e.g. 00:34. This is sensible default behaviour but bad for my use case.