This is going opposite to the discussion we had the other day. In my opinion, we should reduce the video player app to be only a bit more than <video controls> and my team is going to work on this. Deleting the player entirely may not be worth it.

I did raise this in the discussion. This untriaged bug is an attempt to get movement on some outstanding video player app bugs. Deleting the standalone app is a straightforward way to resolve this.

I'm looking for good reasons to keep the standalone video player. I'm not really finding any, but please to raise any you can think of. Android doesn't have a standalone video player -- it's just part of Gallery. It seems confusing for ChromeOS to have one. It's also a maintenance burden - see e.g. go/video-player-cast-dev .

We can still have a video experience separate to the Gallery, but it doesn't need to be an app. E.g. Files app could simply play a video fullscreen when double-clicked, or when `Play` is selected from a context menu.

> We can still have a video experience separate to the Gallery, but it doesn't need to be an app.

In fact we already have `quick view` in the files app. Video can be played in-app by pressing space. There's a `pop-out` button that opens the video app. Perhaps we should replace the `pop-out` button with a fullscreen button?

QuickView takes our tally of default-installed video player apps is up to 3. If a user installs Google Photos, they get a fourth.

Android has Google Photos (when the Play apps are installed) which handle videos standalone from the Gallery. Having the gallery app on Chrome OS would create a less immersive experience.

Also, the maintenance burden will be much lower when moving to native controls.

Would it be worth adding metrics to see the usage of all this?

We can't create a mandatory dependency on Play apps as not all Chrome OS devices support them.  I'm working on a more complete longer-term plan, but this work moves us in the right direction regardless.

With photos installed, most video types (not .mov it seems) will have 3 options in right-click Open with..
 - Video Player (default)
 - Photos
 - Open with Gallery

Non-"power" users are unlikely to use this menu, so we can add whatever logic we like for "default". E.g. Use Photos when available. So users of Photos don't really need to know about the the "less immersive" experience. This is similar to the status quo vs Video Player (i.e. Gallery is only likely to open a Video when opened via the Camera app).

(note I couldn't discover any UI for a user to override what is "default" in this menu. Maybe it doesn't exist, or maybe Android apps don't store the right pref when installed).

We could also add logic that's a closer match to Android, which is just to immediately start playing the video fullscreen (i.e. without launching any app, similar to the current "quickview").


Note I have no objection to moving to native controls in the video app. It just comes with a warning of, "Hey, maybe we should just delete this entirely." :)

My 2 cents - I do think it's more elegant to have one app (Gallery) provide the support for viewing/playing both image/video files, although as noted here, there would be some work required to improve the video file support in Gallery given we've just added this feature.

Re: Comment #7 - We keep a list of default apps for file types where native apps are prioritized so we can update this to be Gallery for videos if we decide to transition the full functionality over. Additionally, in the "OPEN" dropdown menu in Files app, users have the ability to "Change default..." to set a different default app to open a file type.