Amazon Prime web player uses it but does not force keyboard focus on the place where it can detect it, so many times you have to click first before it will pause on space bar.

Focus handling is generally terrible in web apps, but few instances infuriate me like this one.

Space bar handling in media players is a particularly hard problem because space bar is also the key that users expect to trigger the currently focused button. Some users rely entirely on keyboard focus.

So it starts to intersect with some non-obvious accessibility issues.

This is true as an explanation why it happens. I would expect the focused control to be visible and obviously marked (highlight, rectangle, etc). When all that's visible on the screen is the movie, or when the last thing you did was hit something to play the movie, the app should switch focus to whatever control needs to have it for space to play/pause. This is already a solved problem, many console video players do this, Netflix does it, etc. It drives me nuts that something so trivial in an area of an app that is (comparatively) so simple, remains broken for so long. It is not really important, but it destroys the potential for the app to feel natural and (in Apple parlance) beautiful to use.

Disney Plus doesn't either, most annoying thing ever. Has me wondering why there's no open source 'streaming website' the only value add is the content.

Have you used Kodi?

Roughly equivalent: why do people shop at Whole Foods when they can get the same food cheaper at a farmer’s market? The produce is washed, curated for imperfections, and marked up.

These streaming platforms are not perfect as no product since Unix has been, but to think altruistic programmers working for free can do an equivalent job is hubris. These interfaces take years of iteration and optimization in subtle ways like Netflix A/B testing thousands of generated cover photos.

WinAmp doesnt

Fortunately Audacious does, and you can use WinAmp skins with Audacious.

Doesn't at all discount your point, just wanted to help out anyone who's still using WinAmp because of the skins (I was up to last year).

Really? What key does it use instead?

ctr P

neither does twitter. and it pauses when you maximize

Neither does YouTube, likely the most popular video playing entity today, respect the spacebar on iOS.

I think you’re mistaken, YouTube (in all the forms I use it with a keyboard at least) supports spacebar as a pause key.

Your browser might try to pop you down half a page if the thing that is selected or highlighted on the page is not the video player itself though. But it works 100% of the time in fullscreen.

YouTube's keyboard handling is Insanely Intuitive™, I must absolutely agree.

Usefully, the up/down keys don't change the volume unless the player is also focused.

What's incredibly sad is that j/k/l were agreed upon to rewind/pause/forward the video, and these generally work unless you're in a textbox... but dedicated keys were not similarly approved to control the volume.

--

My current winner for Absolutely Favorite Piece Of YouTube-Related Keyboard Functionality©®℠ is...

YouTube Music (https://music.youtube.com/)... which uses a different set of fundamental keyboard shortcuts to YouTube. [;]=pause, [j]=next, [k]=prev, [l]=forward, [h]=rewind.

There are two disasters here.

The first is that <YouTube/pause> == <YouTube Music/rewind to beginning>. "Nooooo! I was 2 hours?? and how many seconds??? into this video... >.<". Naturally, in this situation, I ReWoUnD ThE ViDeO To ThE BeGiNnInG MySeLf, so YouTube's "last play position" indicator can't help me here. YAYYY.

The second disaster is that it's obvious a Vim user clearly argued successfully for Music to use Vi-style hjkl, but both the key choices and how they are presented in the UI could not be less intuitive, regardless of whether the user also uses Vim or not.

I copied above exactly how the UI (in the [?] popup) lists the sequence. Specifically, the whole thing is shifted left by 1 position, wrapping [h] around to the right. Fixing that to show the sequence how a Vim user would expect, it looks like: [h]=rewind, [j]=next, [k]=prev, [l]=forward.

But then, any Vim user is going to be utterly confused by this sequence, not only because of the mild readjustment of assigning up/down to prev/next and left/right to seeking - but because Vim "up" [j] is assigned to "next", and Vim "down" [k] is assigned to "prev".

Upside down playlist much?!?!

I no longer use YouTube Music, solely because of the number of long videos I have rewound and lost my position in.

I'm also incidentally trying to passively commit hjkl to memory (you know, the whole spaced repetition thing), and all the above was just too confusing.

Not sure if whether it is intended, or a weird combination of my browser and extensions, but right now, if I click on the play/pause button on Youtube video page, it becomes focused (with a visual clue of a blue box), and then pressing space bar starts and stops (or stops and starts) the video in rapid succession because it is considered a keyboard command and a button activation at the same time.

Actually, not quite at the same time, and that returns us to the old question of viability of reinventing GUIs in Javascript. I guess that even around 1990 window messages of some kind appearing with such a delay from a single action would mean the GUI is based on wrong principles, or the programmer doesn't know how to use it.

It's even funnier to imagine what happens when you press and hold space. The button icon is mostly in in-between animation state from all the repeated presses, but the video starts or stops only on first press and on release. Guess how much fun people have programming window system inside a virtual machine inside a browser using window system inside real machine.

> Vim "up" [j] is assigned to "next", and Vim "down" [k] is assigned to "prev".

j is down and k is up in vim

Originally derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#ADM-3A, which I only learned (maybe from HN) long after becoming a vi user.

Edit: I've wondered whether the Dance Dance Revolution on-screen arrow order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revolution#/media/..., which I also have deep in my muscle memory, is somehow also related to the hjkl arrows (as it also goes ← ↓ ↑ → horizontally).

Wait, a mouse driven application is using the right hand keys for shortcuts? Yes, that sounds very handy for a left hand mouse user.

I prefer to be able to set my keys myself. I use the left hand WASD keys together with ctrl+shift for most things so I can control the music in any application (with winamp). No need to find buttons, the hand is already there even if I'm using the mouse with the right hand.

> (...) but dedicated keys were not similarly approved to control the volume.

Arrow-up and arrow-down?

Youtube itself changed the space bar behavior from context specific (pause if player in focus, scroll of comment in focus) but they rolled that back so space is always pause.

I like the context sensitive behavior and wrote a grease mo key script to restore it.

Run into a strange behavior though. When I pause the video with the mouse (and consequently, leave the pointer above the play button), and later try to continue the play with space, it will double-press the play button and pause the video again.

The play button is focused, and pressing Space activates a button. So it resumes playback. Then the key handler kicks in, and recognises that Space should pause playback, so it does that.

(I don’t know which order the two things happen in, but clearly they should make sure both don’t happen.)

Thank you for pointing that out since it seems to explain why the space bar behaves erratically. I far prefer the space bar to hunting down the k-key when trying to relax.

My problem with Youtube is when you're not watching a video the spacebar doesn't respond to its default behavior in the browser of doing a page down.

Unless your tab focus is on the other controls like volume :)