I think it'd be neat if I could replace all the FLV players with a good one like the Youtube one or the Hulu one.
They often suck in that:
1) They're shitty at predicting the optimum buffer size
2) They do not continue buffering when paused, or do not indicate whether they are buffering.
3) The behavior for the connection failing in the middle of a pre-roll ad is different for the connection failing in the actual content, sometimes leaving it stuck
4) They do not always allow random access in the video, and when they do, sometimes they have to reload a portion of the video that you've already seen.
5) On some of my Macs, fullscreen viewing mode is vastly slower and more CPU intensive than just using the zoom feature in Universal Access.
1) They're shitty at predicting the optimum buffer size
This is set by the website owner, not the FLV player. For many (JW, Flowplayer, etc) it's a parameter in the HTML.
2) They do not continue buffering when paused
I haven't seen a player that doesn't continue buffering when paused. If there is one, it must really, really suck. This might also be the case with using RTMP streaming instead of progressive download, which is just plain stupid for anything that isn't live content.
4) They do not always allow random access in the video, and when they do, sometimes they have to reload a portion of the video that you've already seen.
Random access requires either using hinted FLVs (with FLVtool++) or mod_h264streaming for MP4 files, so it's not surprising that some websites don't do the necessary extra step.
5) On some of my Macs, fullscreen viewing mode is vastly slower and more CPU intensive than just using the zoom feature in Universal Access.
Flash's rendering code is notoriously bad; it does basically everything in software, in part because of the unpredictability of video drivers and so forth. AFAIK, the website owner has to set Flash's hardware acceleration mode on (it's off by default), and even then it only applies in fullscreen mode.
And even more than they think--Flash has a number of "hidden" variables that are either only exposed to the official media server, or are even exposed (or at least documented) only to specific major customers.
They often suck in that:
1) They're shitty at predicting the optimum buffer size
2) They do not continue buffering when paused, or do not indicate whether they are buffering.
3) The behavior for the connection failing in the middle of a pre-roll ad is different for the connection failing in the actual content, sometimes leaving it stuck
4) They do not always allow random access in the video, and when they do, sometimes they have to reload a portion of the video that you've already seen.
5) On some of my Macs, fullscreen viewing mode is vastly slower and more CPU intensive than just using the zoom feature in Universal Access.