What's your favorite video player UI and why?

Just doing a little usability research on video playback and I have to say, while there's been fast adoption of the "youtube" standard. I believe it's still an imperfect science. Some UI's are too small, some buttons are misleading, some controls require too much mouse precision.

I just wanted to get a take on what you've found to be intuitive enjoyable and most importantly comfortable (cozy?).

I'm also curious as to what features people enjoy and how it's laid out.

I know this is sort of a niche market for players but the slow-mo option on the skate or die video play is a cool feature so you can rewatch tricks and how they did them.

Would be great if all players had that somewhere so people wouldn't feel the need to waste bandwidth and after a clip have it replay in slow-mo 10 times.

Vimeo's player is my current fave. It's transparent, not in the way, does what I need. Joost is a close second, then perhaps YouTube (which I dislike).

Damn that didn't even come to mind. I like vimeo as a whole better then youtube. The quality of the player, HD video, and content is way above youtube.

i like the vimeo player as well.
The flickr video player is nice, because of its simplicity.

regarding quality it's all in the compression value.
Sorenson used to be the stuff when there was no hd. Youtube has to cater to iphone which means compression twice. Once to mov for iphones and once to .flv for everyone else.


i like Hulu.and msnbc. only the stuff I need when and where i need it.

Vimeo is nice. Quite like the new QuickTime X player, even cleaner!

Also quite like the BBC iPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ – love how the volume control is set to 10 by default, but you can turn it up to 11!

Flickr does have a great player as well since it does exactly what it needs for that site.

I understand the whole 90 second limit and it really has pushed people to think about the content they're uploading. I feel though if flickr totally revamps it's outlook and pushes for photo and artistic video without a limit the community could really benefit.

brightcove has everything

damn $99 a month

Thanks guys. Good input. I'm kinda partial to the hulu player. I really hate volume sliders that grow out of the speaker icon.