Flash Player for Videos

Alois/Jeff,

The optimal solution for this problem would be switching to an HTML5 player on pingskills.com from the the good old flash player. Here's a free, open-source and customizable HTML 5 player that supports subtitles and runs on all Windows/Apple/Android platforms:

http://www.videojs.com

This would definitely be worth a try.

Apart from this technical issue the site and the especially the content is great, congrats!

All the best,

Gabor

Thanks.

I just joined PingSkills, and was looking forward to watching this week's video[0], but am unfortunately unable to do so. In order to watch it, I must apparently install Adobe Flash Player. But I cannot, with a clear conscience, install proprietary software[1].

So I really hope you can switch to an HTML5 solution. And don't hesitate to contact me with inquiries about this! :-]

[0]  <http://www.pingskills.com/table-tennis/match-strategy/basic-tactics/>
[1]  <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html>

Hi Alexander,

Thanks for brining this up again. Switching to a HTML5 solution is something that I would like to do. Once question I have is do I still need multiple formats (mp4, ogg, and webm) of the videos to support it?

Hallo Jeff,

Thanks for your inquiry. I do not know much about Apple devices or Microsoft Windows, but OGV (OGG Theora + Vorbis) and  WebM (VP8 + Vorbis) would both work excellently for me. There is no need for both.

I read a recent-ish blog post on the subject[0], and from what I can tell you should provide mp4 and WebM for Apple devices. OGV is only necessary for *very* old browsers that do not support WebM. If anyone is browsing your websites with browsers that are so old, they should likely upgrade them anyway to avoid security issues. However, whether to use OGV in addition to mp4 and WebM is of course entirely your decision.

[0]  <http://blog.zencoder.com/2013/09/13/what-formats-do-i-need-for-html5-video/>

Thanks Alexander. It might take a bit of time to get this implemented but I'll definitely start working on it.

Hi Alexander and others,

I've just made a change to all of the videos under the lessons page that used to use a flash player to now use the HTML5 video tag. If you get a chance can you see if it works for you?

Thanks,

Jeff.

Hallo Jeff,

I tested a video[0], and indeed it played fine.

There are no closed captions available to me on this video, but I do not know if there were closed captions in the Flash version either.

Thanks a lot for your work on this, Jeff! I now have a wealth of new videos available to me.

[0]  <http://www.pingskills.com/table-tennis/strokes-and-technique/the-push-in-detail/>

Thanks for checking that Alexander. We haven't yet added subtitles for the push in detail video.