We asked for your feedback

We recently ran a survey about our HTML 5 player. Thanks to all of those who took the time to answer a few questions for us! What we found was that most people are still using the HTML 5 player, and those who switched back to our older Silverlight player did so for two main reasons: either they liked the older navigation style with the list of clips on the left,  or they were having trouble getting video playback to work properly.

We acted

We’ve taken this feedback to heart and recently released an update to the HTML 5 player that gives you, our customers, more control over the experience. Do you want that clip listing on the left side again? You can have it! Are you finding the HTML 5 playback experience to be problematic? No problem – you can now choose to use a Silverlight playback element (or WMP) instead of the HTML 5 video element. All while getting the benefit of all the features that our HTML 5 player offers, such as closed captions in 50+ languages for courses that we’ve transcribed.

How to select a different playback element

Simply press the gear icon on the new player, and you’ll see a settings menu like the one below. The video playback preference is right at the top. Note that you won’t see WMP as an option unless you’re running Internet Explorer, and Silverlight should only show up as an option on platforms where it’s supported (e.g. it won’t show up on Linux). The goal is to have video playback continue from where it left off, even after you change this setting, but if you have trouble, simply refresh the player’s browser window. Your choice will be persisted in a cookie, which allows you to choose a different playback element for each device or browser where you watch Pluralsight courses. We hope that this flexibility will allow you to choose a browser/playback experience that works best for you. Experiment!

Left side navigation

In the settings menu above, did you see the “Left side navigation” option? If you enable that, you’ll get the list of clips on the left side similar to the experience in our old Silverlight player. Except with our HTML 5 player, you can see the entire course at once, not just a single module.

One player to rule them all

Once we work the kinks out of this latest release of our HTML 5 player, we’re well positioned to eliminate the old Silverlight and Windows Media players that we offer alongside the HTML 5 player. And what that means for our customers is more features, more quickly delivered, because we’ll have a single online player to enhance, not three. And what’s cool is that of all the players we’ve ever offered, our HTML 5 player works in the most places. It works on the iPad, Linux, Google TV, and even the XBox 360!

SOLID design made it possible

Our dev team has a passion for software quality. So when it came time to build the new HTML 5 player, we took a few days to find a Javascript framework that would allow us to use Test Driven Development (TDD) easily, even in Javascript (we landed on AngularJS). TDD helped us achieve the SOLID principles we wanted in our player. This naturally led to an adapter layer over the HTML 5 video element, and so when I challenged the team to allow Silverlight playback, that abstraction made it pretty straightforward. They were able to use a Silverlight playback element instead by simply maintaining the same adapter abstraction with a Silverlight implementation. And while they were at it, they also gave me a Windows Media Player implementation for customers running Internet Explorer.

Our HTML 5 player has over 400 jasmine unit tests, which gives our team a lot of courage when it comes time to make changes, which is good for our customers, since we’re not afraid to change the code to make this player better over time.