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There’s just something about this 🔥🔥
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Who wants to come to a picnic with an outdoor movie? I'll bring the video player 🧺🎬
Picnic Cinema is my new Video.js skin: a 3D garden cinema where the controls hang as tags from festoon bulbs. The lights glow when you pause and dim when the film starts.
Too comfy to reach the bulbs? Grab the remote on the picnic table.
You can still use the keyboard like a normal player: Space to play, arrows to seek and change the volume, F for fullscreen.
this is such a fun concept!
Storytime, the Pop-Up Edition: a picture book you can play
My first entry dressed the player as a picture book. This one makes the book do the work, so every part of the metaphor is a real control or real player state.
Chapters are pages. Each chapter becomes a numbered tab on the crayon trail, the scrub preview names the page you are pointing at, and the folded corner of the picture is a button: tap it to turn to the next page (N and P on a keyboard). No chapters in your video? No tabs and no corner.
The star is the player's state. She walks the trail while the story plays, walks faster or slower with the reading speed, and falls asleep when you pause. Reading speed itself is a snail, a pair of footsteps or a rabbit. In bedtime mode the paper turns midnight blue, the picture dims and the star becomes a moon. The last page is "The End".
The book folds to fit. On small players the two-row strip closes into a one-row bookmark that still carries play, time, the trail, mute and fullscreen, and takes about 30% of the picture instead of 45%. Speed, captions and bedtime tuck into a pop-up page that closes with Esc.
It works on any video (try the "Any plain video" switch on the demo), recolours with --media-accent-color, and keeps every control at 44px or more with visible two-tone focus rings, captions lifted above the controls, and a calm mode under reduced motion.
The demo film, The Little Star Walks Home, is my own paper-cut animation that runs from bright day to dark night to test contrast. It streams from Mux, and the same player is live on my own site. Plain HTML and CSS on Video.js v10 components, no build step.
This is such a magical concept! A picture book you can actually play is such a beautiful idea. I love how every part of the metaphor is a real control, chapters as pages, the corner turns them, and a star walks the story home. So playful, so clever, and so thoughtfully designed. Good luck with the challenge!
Meniscus is a liquid glass skin for Video.js v10. A meniscus is the curved surface of a liquid, and the whole player is designed as one.
The ripple. When you press play, one soft ripple runs through the video picture itself.
The glass. The controls are frosted glass tiles. They pick up colour from the film, so the player changes with every scene.
The drops. Back 10 s, Play and Forward 10 s are three glass drops joined by liquid. The playhead is a drop too, and it squashes as you drag it.
The sound. Each control makes a soft glass sound, created in the browser. It follows the player’s volume, goes quiet on mute, and can be turned off in Settings.
For everyone. Every button works with the keyboard and shows a clear focus ring. On a phone, the controls move into two rows and the menus use the whole screen. If your device asks for reduced motion or reduced transparency, the ripple stops and the glass becomes solid.
The film streams from Mux in every size from 360p to 4K. The demo clip and its music are only there to show the player. They are not part of the skin and are not covered by its licence.
