Video preview UI: obscuring too much of the preview

[foss-]

Android 16
Aria 1.4.0b1

Noticed the video preview has changed. Been looking for a setting but was unable to find something to change this. It does look nice, but imo isn't very functional. The issue is: the play button is obscuring the tiny preview image in the middle which actually just is the avatar image of the user who created the post and the fact the rest of the preview just shows a single color isn't helping either. Video preview is actually very relevant to help determine if I want to watch a video or not. If I see some media outlet I don't want to see I wouldn't click play. And showing more of the preview image would give a better idea of the sort of video that users are about to watch.

[poppingmoon]

You should see thumbnails for local videos. Currently, there is no setting to change the style of the preview.

Misskey does not create thumbnail images for remote videos. Before #743, videos without a thumbnail were displayed with a single color background and a play button.

In Aria 1.4.0-beta.1, the user avatar is displayed in the preview, and the background color is the average color of the user avatar. The purpose of this change was to emphasize those videos and make them less monotonous. The button does overlap the avatar, but I do not want to make the button smaller because the main role of the preview is to indicate that the media is playable. Also, they should not be confused with the actual thumbnail, and they should be clearly recognized as placeholders.

I have noticed that Misskey Web shows thumbnails for remote videos. It seems the <video> tag preloads the video and shows the first frame as the thumbnail (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/video#poster). We can do something similar on Flutter, but it will increase data usage and may have a negative impact on performance, so it should be an opt-in option.

[foss-]

Thanks for taking the time to explain what is going on. This is indeed a nice improvement then. Personally I'd always prefer fetching video thumbs even if that means increased data rate, which is not an issue for me.