Hard Rejected, Three and a half years worth of work in this project need feedback.

Reviewer said he or she could provide feedback on how to get it into a state in which it could be approved, however it did not meet the minimum requirements for him or her to do so. My project is a pure-javascript HTML5 web video player with full support for advanced substation alpha subtitles. I’ve spent three and a half years working on this project by myself and I’m not about to abandon it now.

The reviewer had this to say:

Your item does not provide the necessary design and code quality for
this category. As higher quality items become available in the
marketplace, approval requirements will increase to maintain appropriate
marketplace quality.While I’d be able to provide feedback as to how to
get this approved, I can only do after it has crossed a certain
threshold, quality wise. I’m sorry to say this isn’t there yet.

First I have two questions:

  1. Is minifying my code a problem?
  2. Is performance even a factor in getting it approved?

Second here’s the demo i submitted with the project.
And here’s that same demo with the default player skin and gpu acceleration enabled.

Finally thank you for critiquing this I really appreciate it.

I think the main reason plugin got rejected is because the performance is not so good… The scrolling pauses the video and when i click continue it’s waiting for several seconds before the video starts again.

The second reason it got rejected due to poor design and lack of marketing.

It doesn’t do that for me, the player uses requestAnimationFrame to do it’s drawing so unless your browser doesn’t support that it should scroll just fine. or do you mean seeking pauses the video? because that’s intended.

Edit: what do you think needs to be improved in terms of design and what do you mean by lack of marketing?

This is what I see when open your second link using Safari http://cl.ly/image/1S0T3A273F2q
I also noticed that you are using HTML table to format the text blocks. Try to use css instead.

This is what I see in Firefox and this is what I see in Chrome.

With all dues respect either way the demo does not look or feel premium at all.

Phrases like WIP (which I assume means work in progress) are not a good idea

The FPS counter at the top of the player in the second link does not look good

Is it responsive because the demos are not?

Tables in your code are a real no no.

To be honest CSS positioning is not my strong suite, the demo page was just there to demonstrate the player, however I will work on the demo page and try to improve it. The subtitle support is complete apart from 1 or 2 uncommonly-used features I haven’t implemented yet (like images in the subtitles and the option to have solid-color backgrounds behind subtitles (most subtitles in substation alpha and advanced substation alpha format just use outlines instead of this)). The player can be made any size or resolution, but doesn’t currently alter it’s size when the window size changes unless it is fullscreen. Any feedback in regards to the player itself?

It’s quite hard to asses the player especially with minified code and personally I am not technical enough to really judge properly but no matter how good it is to be successful here you need to tick the full package box e.g appealing demo and that shows all it can do not just a couple of demos, responsiveness is not a set requirement but it’s very much expected by buyers.

You are competing with some pretty impressive plugins and players already for sale that are visually pretty, simple to use and implement.

Again I am not familiar enough with this kind of feature and no idea how important or valuable a substation alpha subtitle is to someone but three years is a long time to work on something like a player and I would imagine that most people on here are going to look for the best looking and easy to use player to embed YouTube videos or upload their own.

If the reviewer (who will be an expert) hard rejected the file then it’s not just the demo that needs work but the player itself

I understand, I’m just trying to get some insight into what he found wrong with the player itself. I appreciate the feedback on the demo though ill try to come up with a demo of all the features.

Normally if it’s hard rejected there are too many things to list.

Improving the demo might help limit the issues to those with the player itself but:

  • for sure the lack of responsiveness is an issue
  • does it have Vimeo support too?
  • if I click to a different point on the timeline (even when buffered) the screen goes blank and there is a long delay before the video begins again. This does not strike me as a good feature.
  • maybe its the video itself but it looks very pixelated on my laptop and iMac
  • the player name typography is not very nice and the timer when paused feels a bit clumpy

Ok thanks, when you get the blank screen is it when moving forwards or backwards or does it happen every time you seek to a new location?

Both. the delay on playing again is really needs fixing because I never know if I have clicked play properly or not so keep pressing it which could be playing/pausing it.

Can I ask - what were you doing for 3.5 years on this? You must have been v busy with other stuff too right e.g. how much of the 3.5 years was spent actually on this player? I only ask because it does not strike me (again not technical enough to really understand) as something which should take that long and also video and subsequent players etc. must evolve a lot in that time period

1 Like

About 3/4ths of the time I’ve spent on this player has been devoted to the advanced substation alpha and substation alpha subtitle renderers, the player currently has two functioning subtitle renderers, the SVG based renderer is the slower of the two and has more bugs but is included because the other renderer is a hybrid canvas2d/WebGL renderer that won’t work fully on all computers as it requires WebGl to do the 3d transformations of subtitles. The SVG renderer is actually a complete re-write of my first subtitle renderer I wrote for the player. The hybrid renderer is about 1740 lines long, the SVG render is about 1289 lines long and the code for parsing the advanced substation alpha and substation alpha subtitle files is about 594 lines long so in total about 3623 lines of code in the project are devoted to ASS/SSA subtitles, to put that in perspective the core player code (the code responsible for managing the player’s state,instances,controls,video playback, font loading, option parsing and gpu acceleration) is about 1522 lines long.

P.S.
The pixelation is because this demo originally had a 720p version of BigBuckBunny but it wouldn’t fit on my dropbox.
P.P.S.
I don’t get a delay when i seek but it does flash a blank screen while seeking, ill work on fixing that.

It’s a very very risky assumption that working on subtitles related features for such a long period of time is indeed going to pay off… Before investing so much time in a single feature, perhaps you should have done the research to determine wether or not potential buyers value subtitles to such an extend…

I understand your concern about people’s interest in the subtitles. I don’t expect everyone to find the subtitles useful, however this subtitle format is practically the only one used in fan-translation and currently only can be rendered on a native video player and my web-player. It is also very very powerful and if used well can do all kinds of things for example, a combination of custom fonts, shape drawing and 3d transformation, clipping and animation can allow you to translate signs or text in the background of a video in such a way that it looks like the signs were originally written in the language it is translated to. That kind of capability is something that would be very useful if you wished to make content available in multiple languages. Then again not everyone needs that, which is why I have other features planned that will make it stand out even more from other web players. If anyone has any suggestions for features or design tweaks etc. please feel free.