Less mouse for your (five) buck(s)

May 19, 2010 7:00 AM

Pony Request: Being able to close the in-site Youtube viewer with the escape key would be flipping sweet.

I have no idea how difficult this would be.

Yes, I'm lazy/ a cursor-finder-hater.

posted by rudster to Feature Requests at 7:00 AM (41 comments total)

I agree.
posted by alligatorman at 7:15 AM on May 19, 2010

Thirded.
posted by phunniemee at 7:23 AM on May 19, 2010

There's an in-site youtube viewer?!?
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:38 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Actually, that would be cool.
posted by ob at 7:42 AM on May 19, 2010

I've got a related pony: I hate when I visit some page that has a bunch embedded Youtube videos and I start to watch one and then I'm all, "Duh, I don't really want to watch this stupid cellphone unboxing" so I press pause or escape and it stops playing but it KEEPS LOADING. and there is nothing I can do to make it stop loading.

PB: please make YouTube work the proper way for me on websites that are not Youtube or MetaFilter. You can do that, right?
posted by dirtdirt at 7:44 AM on May 19, 2010

If you could upscale all YouTube videos to 1080P 3D, that would be great! THX!
posted by blue_beetle at 7:50 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

There's an in-site youtube viewer?!?

Check your Preferences, find the item labeled "Display YouTube Video inline?" and turn it on. Youtube links on the blue will thenceforth be postfixed with a little icon that when clicked will pop up a lightbox youtube window.

THX!

No, Dolby.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:02 AM on May 19, 2010 [4 favorites]

THX!

No, Dolby.

Moo.
posted by zarq at 8:06 AM on May 19, 2010

find the item labeled "Display YouTube Video inline?" and turn it on

Free! Free from YouTube comments, thank G*d almighty, free at last!
posted by Devils Rancher at 8:08 AM on May 19, 2010

Direct your thanks to Steve Jobs, and you can also be free from programs that steal your private data, free from shortened battery life, and free from porn. The times they are a-changin'.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 8:14 AM on May 19, 2010

THX!

Take four red capsules. In 10 minutes, take two more. Help is on the way.
posted by shakespeherian at 8:16 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yes, this would be awesome. On my netbook, the inline youtube displays in such a size that the "Close Window" link is JUST BELOW the edge of my browser screen, so the only way for me to click it is to go fullscreen in my browser. And I am lazy.
posted by specialagentwebb at 8:29 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

What if they're heavy metal videos? Because you don't do heavy metal in Dubly, you know.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 8:48 AM on May 19, 2010

Esc is go! It even seems to work in IE6.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:59 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I have the same problem as specialagentwebb on my netbook. Another way to close the window would be awesome.
posted by Cygnet at 9:20 AM on May 19, 2010

Oh, wait, pb already did it! Dang that was fast!
posted by Cygnet at 9:20 AM on May 19, 2010

I press pause or escape and it stops playing but it KEEPS LOADING. and there is nothing I can do to make it stop loading.

Right click on the player, choose "Stop download".
posted by Rhomboid at 9:48 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm not having any success getting escape to close the player in Safari 4.0.4 on Mac OS X. :-(
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 10:03 AM on May 19, 2010

pb: Esc is go! It even seems to work in IE6.

I'm not getting any esc action yet. Safari 4, Mac 10.6.3.

I love the inline youtubing – it adds an extra layer of seductive timewasting goodness to those SLYT posts. And it just keeps getting better; first full-screen capability, now this? Smashing.
posted by him at 10:06 AM on May 19, 2010

Yep, confirmed it's not working in Safari and Chrome. Looking into it.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:07 AM on May 19, 2010

It also seems to be mapped to a few other keys. Not a big deal, but when I was adjusting the volume on my laptop, I let go of my Fn key before I let go of the arrow key, and the video closed on me. It looks like the Page Up/Down keys do this too.
posted by niles at 10:17 AM on May 19, 2010

It's working for me, Chrome 5.0.375.38 beta. Page Up/Down didn't close it, but for some reason they did make the page go up and down.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:31 AM on May 19, 2010

ok, should be working in Safari and Chrome now. If you're JavaScript curious, you need to use onKeyDown/Up for WebKit browsers, not onKeyPress. (more info, and more) I did not know that. IE seems to prefer keyPress.

Thanks niles, restricted the keypress a little more so it should be Esc-only now.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:42 AM on May 19, 2010

Looks good here! Thanks, pb!
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 10:51 AM on May 19, 2010

On Windows ALT+F4 will fix that for you. Ctrl+F4 will also do the job.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:01 AM on May 19, 2010

It's working awesome; cheers pb, youdaman.
posted by rudster at 11:10 AM on May 19, 2010

I love it when a pony comes together.
posted by The Whelk at 12:03 PM on May 19, 2010

I love it when a pony comes together.

Joke about making glue.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:07 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Jokes are the glue that holds together the gears of our website.
posted by The Whelk at 12:14 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Wouldn't glue make the gears not work?

...oh.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:21 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Can I piggyback a pony to disable the embedded player if the youtube link disallows embedding, or is that still impossible to tell ahead of time? I found something about "format=5" in the youtube API to restrict available videos to those taht allow embedding, but I honestly don't know anything about this.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:29 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

No, unfortunately we have no way of knowing ahead of time if a video is embeddable or not.
posted by pb (staff) at 1:25 PM on May 19, 2010

There's always a way.
posted by jeffamaphone at 2:58 PM on May 19, 2010

True, but is the way worth the time investment? We could use regex to parse each post/comment, store the YouTube video ID in a table, use their API to get its embeddable status, and then look up each ID when displaying it on the site. But the embeddable status changes over time, so even that method would require periodic API pings to determine its current status. And with tens of thousands of YouTube IDs in our system, that's no small task on its own.

I'm open to ideas, though. Maybe I'm missing something more solid.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:19 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

It is in principle possible to programatically query if a video has embedding disabled but it would be unworkable to query youtube for every page render, so you would have to create a table storing the (yt_id, is_embedable) tuple for every youtube ID. That's doable in theory but it's a lot of hassle and it doesn't handle all of the innumerate edge cases like where the uploader initially allows embedding then later disables it.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:19 PM on May 19, 2010

Or, what he said.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:21 PM on May 19, 2010

You could crowd source it and just let us mefites flag it as "embedding disabled" and the just remember that once.
posted by jeffamaphone at 4:18 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Asking people to mark videos with embedding disabled still requires building a link-indexing service. And maybe that's where we need to head someday, it would allow us to do much more data mining and fun data collection. I think people tend to think of MeFi as in a similar category with Digg or Delicious where a single link is the primary method of organization. In those systems you have a single URL with a bunch of associated metadata. And in that situation, it's easy to perform actions on those single links: voting, favoriting, flagging, and everything else can apply to a specific URL. In our case, we have a big chunk of text that contain potentially hundreds of links. So all metadata surrounding that chunk of text applies to everything inside.

We don't currently have systems in place to treat each discrete link within a chunk of text as something that can stand on its own. Part of that is logistics. It's simply very brittle to parse user-generated HTML. It's sloppy, people forget to close a quotation mark or use an opening apostrophe with a closing quote. We allow that because we're informal. It means more successful posting, less frustration for post authors, and more content flowing freely. It also means more frustration trying to treat that chunk of text formally.

The inline YouTube player is a nice hack. We just do some string-matching and insert some HTML when a match is found; it's not very smart. But it gets us 90% of the way there for dimming the lights and showing a video. We're at the end of what that hack gets us, though. As soon as we want to make the player smarter, we need to move to a completely different system.

If we could find a way to verify embed-ability on the client-side, I'd be all for it. If the YouTube API could handle dozens of requests on every MeFi pageview, I'd set it up. But I don't think that's realistic. So until we're indexing links, I think we'll have to live with some frustration with the player.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:42 PM on May 19, 2010

Just add a "disallows embedding" flag.
posted by davejay at 4:43 PM on May 19, 2010

I think if the video embedding is disabled, the pop-up should switch to mefi chat roulette.
posted by maxwelton at 6:21 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Thanks WCityMike, but Reddit is one of those sites that uses a single link as a unit of organization. So someone submits a single URL to Reddit and they do a bunch of stuff with that particular URL. Here at MeFi, someone can submit hundreds of URLs at once as a single post, and then we have a discussion about that. That's the fundamental difference between MeFi and so many link-sharing applications. We're more of a text-sharing application that happens to contain links. (Or maybe not in the case of Ask.)
posted by pb (staff) at 2:25 PM on May 20, 2010