Dear Dropout Web Team: I will fix the issue of keeping audio and captions between videos for free

I'm a Senior Web Applications Developer located in Texas. I have 15 years of experience in integrations and automation, and I have 25 years of experience in web development, front- and backend.

The Vimeo OTT SDK has hooks for getting and setting video volume as well as knowing when captions are enabled as well as which captions are enabled. Adding this functionality should be as simple as altering the template for video playback and storing it as cookie or session data and would be covered by your existing data and privacy policies.

I will gladly donate my time and energy to solving this problem as a longtime fan and subscriber.

On another note, the support staff that handle help tickets from the site are very friendly and nice.

Edit: Thanks to some additional info from u/abridgma it turns out that fixing this would require Vimeo to change their OTT platform and is not something that can even be approached through the interfaces provided to Dropout. In order for Dropout themselves to fix it, it would require a massive architectural overhaul of the entire digital side of Dropout.

Fortunately there's hope, u/KurtThiemann has an interesting browser extension here to solve this issue for many users and add additional functionality.

in dropoutby wyrdsmith

531

97%

16d

RenterMore

152

16d

Lol that’s awesome. Tho they’d definitely not allow someone to do it for free , that’s just bad business. They’d prob want to do a formal contract for the job. Maybe they have a contact email for professional purposes? Sam is also here every once in a while I guess so he could see this. 🤞

abridgma

188

Dropout Crew

16d

Dropout is hosted by Vimeo OTT (as the OP mentions) - we cannot customize and rework the coding of the site functionality ourselves. Definitely appreciate this post though and will be using it in our continuing quest to push for these features on web.

wyrdsmith

16d

Oh I see, y'all are utilizing Vimeo OTT as your web hosting solution as well as a video streaming service. I think I mistakenly thought y'all had a separate web front end that was your site connected to the OTT service through its API. It does seem cost effective as it also includes subscription servicing and what seems to be essentially a CRM and Analytics toolset all wrapped in one. That also explains some other things I've noticed on the site like the series button always opening a new tab because it's probably a link created using the OTT site editor. That also explains why dropout.tv redirects to signup.dropout.tv if it doesn't recognize a user because signup.dropout.tv is a separate site.

Vimeo's OTT is probably cheaper than just using their player and video hosting with a separate hosted site, analytics tools and a CRM, but as a developer it feels restrictive and doesn't seem to be as flexible as it could be, which might limit growth a bit as y'all create new shows and grow your audience. That said, the enterprise level addition of not having to worry about apps for every device? Now that's very much worth it. All though, something like an Angular SPA could be configured with some smart DevOps to build your site with app deployment. But that's putting the cart before the horse.

Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to reply and now that I better understand, I'll let others know if I see them wondering about some of the site's foibles.

abridgma

103

Dropout Crew

16d

Really appreciate the post and the sentiment here (although never offer to work for free, your labor has value). As someone with little knowledge when it comes to this kind of backend / coding stuff, hearing that the feature request should be doable is giving me renewed energy to push for this, and I'll be able to point to this post as evidence that it should be doable.

RenterMore

16d

Yea makes sense i just figured it would be cool if OP was right this was some sort of client-side thing. Totally makes sense if there’s nothing you can do on your end tho

Thanks dropout crew! Keep up the good work :)

KurtThiemann

16d

I've actually made a browser addon that does exactly this (among a few other things) a few weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/dropout/comments/1clret1/browser_addon_that_adds_watch_parties_and_saves/

For OTT, you can't use the regular Vimeo player API, but there is a special API for OTT: https://dev.vhx.tv/player/

wyrdsmith

16d

That's awesome and that's the dev docs I was looking for. I didn't think to check vhx.tv after I found the other docs.

KurtThiemann

16d

I made a custom implementation of the OTT player API client, since I didn't really like how the official one worked and there would probably be some copyright issues with distributing it as part of my addon. It's available on GitHub as part of the addon: https://github.com/KurtThiemann/dropout-helper/blob/master/src/Player/Player.js

wellrundry2113

133

16d

u/samreich

wuukiee81

16d

Oh this would be an incredible accessibility add. Please take OP up on this, Dropout!

ANormalDuckling

16d

for closed captions, it's not an official fix but i've been using a script for chrome a user posted here that automatically turns on captions, it's been working like a dream for me for months!

wuukiee81

16d

Thanks!

arcanepsyche

16d

This guy Vimeo-integrates.

Acsteffy

16d

As much as this would be appreciated. I still want and believe that Dropout would pay you for this.

MerrilyContrary

16d

Please? The problems are known. People want to help.

MrDubTee

16d

I know nothing about what’s happening but I do love this community.

Gonna go Blaze with my main man Squatch. Hope everyone feels like a gremlin this weekend!

cdsnjs

16d

Is it possible to also have it save the video quality & playback speed in the browser version? I've noticed that sometimes that video quality will stick, but the playback speed never does

AReaver

16d

I'd love for this to happen! Really fucking cool of you to even offer. I hope they take you up on it in some fashion.

KFChaos

16d

Don't do anything for free, especially if you're good at it.

CATS_in_a_car

15d

Is it possible to have it save watch time on Firefox too? For some reason it never saves the timestamp if I have to close a video in the middle of watching it and starts from the beginning when I come back to it.

paigeofmybook

15d

Not sure if it’s the same thing but I had a similar issue with Chrome that was due to my adblocker. Once I disabled it for the dropout site I never had that issue again.

Hormo_The_Halfling

15d

Do you think you could fix whatever causes the dropout app to stutter on Samsung TVs

wyrdsmith

15d

In my experience, I can't think of much that would cause stuttering in specific brands of TVs on the web side of things. However, it's possible something about Samsung's motion smoothing/interpolation is causing the stuttering. If your Samsung TVs are newer, you might try adjusting any of the Automatic Picture settings or Motion settings to see if that helps. That's the only thing I can think of, unfortunately.

OdysseusX

13d

The app on the TV is so bad

It doesn't consistently allow you to pause. Unsure if related but the tracking on the video (like the progress bar/time stamp) might not update. So it shows you at X minutes in and if you do try to pause and play or go back and play again it starts from that.

If you let it go to next video sometimes (everytime?) It'll play 2 seconds of the next video then skip to the video after that.

We have just resigned that these are minor annoyances but it does blemish the experience.

Belfetto

16d

I’d be shocked if this got any traction

Immediate-Yak2249

16d

I'm not sure I understand the issue here

wow717

13d

You're a true hero and I hope Sam sees this