Custom Video Player
Comprehensive Guide To Pick The Right Player

Every story has its own hero, and when it comes to a user’s video streaming experience, the video player stands in the center of that narrative. A good video player can make or break a user’s experience while they consume content. How your user interacts with the player based on the content can make or break their experience. Certain controls like speed change and chapters work great when it comes to consuming eLearning content. While at the same time multiple subtitles, auto-resume works the best with OTT content.

A standard online player rarely comes with an option to customize the player to such an extent that it is tailored to your audience. Unless you make a few tweaks(at times a lot more), it won’t work out the best for you. In times like these, the best option is to go for a custom video player. It allows you to change the player to be more suitable for your brand.  Also, you can add or remove controls in the player suitable for your audience.

What is a Custom Video Player?

A custom video player is an online video player that you can personalize according to your own brand.  You can even change the color, design, and player controls according to your requirements. Usually, you’d need to customize your player to ensure that it goes along with your branding also in order to show the controls according to your user requirements.

Why Go For a Custom Video Player?

Going for a custom video player would certainly give a lot of benefits to your website. One of the major benefits would be branding, as you can modify the look of your player to suit your brand. Also with a custom video player, you get more control over the viewing experience of your users. By using custom video controls you can change how your users interact with your videos thus maximizing the impact of your videos.

With a custom video player, you can showcase your video in your own unique way. So let’s say you have eLearning content, you can include chapters in your videos in order to navigate different parts of the video. Also, in case you want to allow your users to search for particular content in the video, you can do so with the help of a caption search, where a user can look for a particular keyword in the caption to get to the relevant part of the video.

Challenges with Building Your Video Player Completely From Scratch?

Building your own player can give you absolute control over its user interface as well as the user experience. It can help you better align the look of your player with your branding. Although building your own custom video player in-house might seem like a great option in the beginning it comes with its own challenges

Here are some challenges you might face while building your own player:

• Time – Building a custom video player from scratch will likely take a lot of work and time. Plus, you’ll need to adjust your expectations for how long it will take to meet your needs. If you want the outcome to be seamless, this could take even more time and energy.
• Performance – Players built from scratch will often be bulky, have a higher likelihood of containing bugs that affect UX, and have slower load times.
• Multiple Device Support – Since your users would be accessing your videos from several devices and browsers, you need to make sure that your player supports all such devices and browsers.
• Updates – New browser updates can wreak havoc on your video player. Without constant monitoring, it’s virtually guaranteed that at some point in time, your video player will be down for something as little as updating just one small part of your player code.

What Features Matter the most in a Custom Video Player?

When you select a custom video player, you need to look for a few features that can be quintessential for your business. Let’s find out what these features are.

Player Performance 

When it comes to your video playback, you want to make sure that the playback performance is good and consistent without any buffering issues or any other errors as such. While choosing a video solution, you need to consider the performance and speed of the custom video player involved, making sure that it has a fast loading time and a good user experience.

Customization of Video Player Controls

With a custom video player, you can optimize the viewing experience of your users and personalize the player UI and controls according to your own branding. This can further enhance the impact of your video and improve the user experience.

You can ensure that the colors of the player are according to your brand, giving you much more flexibility to showcase your videos along with the style of your brand. You can even customize what controls you want to show to your users, including chapters for navigation, search through the transcription, and much more.

Adaptive Bitrate Streaming

The network speed of your users might vary a lot, which in turn might impact their viewing experience. As if the video quality is high on a low network, the video might buffer a lot. With Adaptive streaming, the video quality also changes with network speed. With a good network speed, better video quality would be served to the user and vice versa.

Streaming DRM Content

Nowadays any video platform that sells its video online goes for a DRM solution, you need to make sure that any player that you chose, is compatible with DRM and can stream DRM-protected content.

Crossbrowser Compatibility

Every browser and device you want to stream might have a different player associated with it. So building a player is not just about a single player but a different player for each of these situations, and making sure that users get the same experience in all of them. Whether the user is streaming on the web, iOS, android, react native, or flutter, your user’s experience shouldn’t be compromised.

Open-Source Video Player vs Propriety Media player

When it comes to choosing a video player, the dilemma one often faces is whether one should go for an open source player or to go for a propriety media player. While an open source player obviously comes free of cost a proprietary player comes with a lot of premium features. Here are some of the major differences between the two.

Cost

Open source players are obviously free to users and you can review and evaluate the source code of the player.

Propriety player costs much more, but you get access to several features and integration which would have otherwise taken a lot of time and development on your end.

Bugs & Support

With popular open-source players, you get fewer bugs and the fixes are even fast. As there is always huge community support and documentation associated with it.

With a propriety custom video player, you would get instant support from the team who’d fix the issues for you. In this case, you’ll have a hassle-free resolution without you requiring to go through tons of documentation and videos to find your own solution. It is always in your best interest to go for a solution that provides good support.

Customization

With open-source players, there is a huge scope for customization, as it’s totally up to you how you want your player to be. But in such cases, you’ll have to spend much time and energy on your development team.

For propriety players, you might not get much control, but these tools often come with easy-to-use customization, wherein you can choose which controls you want to use and what the theme of the player should be. All this with just a toggle button, which makes it easy for anyone to customize the player without any prior knowledge.

Leveraging a Video Platform Provider to Build your Player

Video players like Vdocipher’s custom video player are made to be customized without all the hassle of developing a solution from scratch.

You can choose from a variety of function and style presets to fit your site’s branding and UX. Better yet, you can make custom changes to the functionality or presentation with light coding from developers. In short, it offers an approach that is much less resource intensive than building a tool from the ground up.

Custom video platforms also allow you to do considerably less work in the long run, because maintenance is built in. When a new browser update comes out, you won’t have to worry about whether your player will still work correctly

You also get support for video playback on iOS, Android, HTML5, react native, and flutter video player.

How does VdoCipher come into all this?

With VdoCipher you get a ready-to-use video player with various custom controls. You can change the theme of your player according to your brand. Change all the controls to provide the best viewing experience for your audience.

VdoCipher ensures that your users get a great viewing experience, this can be how fast the player loads, how easy it is to navigate in the video,  multilingual captions, and more. Right here are some custom video controls which VdoCipher offers:

Chapters

With chapters, you can break the video down into different sections, and name all these individual sections. This way a user can easily navigate or jump to the relevant sections. It makes it easier for a user when he is interested in only one part of the video. This way a user doesn’t have to scan through the entire video to get to the part he is interested in.

Player Branding & Theme

With Vdocipher you can change the color or theme of the player according to your preferences. You can pick any color you want based on your branding, subtle player features like the play button, progress bar would change depending on the color you chose.

Custom Controls

You can choose which player controls you want to showcase to your users. Depending on your content and user’s requirements, you can opt to show or remove controls such as speed control, skip button and its duration, progress bar, caption, caption search, and a lot more.

Auto Resume

With the auto resume feature, a user can start watching the content right from the point he left the last time. This way it becomes much easier to watch long videos, as they don’t have to scan the entire video to reach the relevant point of the video. With this feature, you always have the option to either automatically resume or even start over the entire video.

Video Analytics

With Vdocipher you get detailed analytics on how your users are interacting with your videos. You can have a look at the total number of views, average watch percentage of videos. You can also see the view of your video on the basis of browsers, country, and platform.

Picture in Picture

You can continue to watch your videos in a floating window while you acess other applications.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Use keyboard shortcuts to interact with the player to pause, play and fast forward video. For example, you can have the player pause and play when the spacebar is pressed. Also, left and right keys can be used to go forward and back in time.

Gestures

You can use gestures like tap, double tap, and swipe on mobile devices to pause, play and fast-forward the video.

Adaptive Bitrate Streaming

With Adaptive Bitrate Streaming, the video quality of the content automatically adjusts to the relevant quality based on the network speed of the user. With a lower network bandwidth, the video quality automatically changes to a lower resolution and vice versa.

DRM Protection

With VdoCipher, your videos are protected with DRM technology and Dynamic Watermarking. DRM technology ensures that only authorized users are allowed to access your videos, and any sort of illegal video download is completely stopped. Even screen recording is stopped on Android and iOS devices. On top of that, you also get dynamic watermarking, so that in case anyone somehow grabs the video, you’ll have a source of the video leak.

Great Customer Support

VdoCipher boasts great customer support to our customers.we provide fast resolution of any of our customer queries ensuring that any playback or other issues are resolved within 1-2 days.

All in All

A custom video player is a must for anyone who wants to give an optimized viewing experience for their customers. It not only allows you to change branding and theme colors but also the controls you want to show your audience.