This is not quite official yet as YouTube has not announced yet official announced the roll out but New TeeVee is reporting that some YouTube users have spotted the new Flash Video player being used by some videos uploaded to YouTube.  What’s interesting about YouTube’s new video player is that it now displays some performance information about the video. The overall look of the video player also looks different from the regular YouTube video player.

As for the video players new features, some of the notables include relocation of the playback button, volume slider, information about the length of the video and selector for different video resolutions below the status bar.

The video player’s volume control was also tweaked a bit that instead of sliding upwards and downwards it was made to slide out sideways instead. This is of course to prevent the volume control from interfering with the video display.

YouTube also removed the caption or annotation buttons when these features are not available in the video.  Also, if you right-click on a video, YouTube will display an option called “show video info.”  This will bring up an information overlay showing size, bit rate, fps, transfer bandwidth and other details about the video and its playback performance.

And the most important enhancements has to do with preventing further buffering of the video. You can now stop the video at any time and clicking on the play button will resume the video’s playback from where you stopped it. Meaning it will no longer default to the start of the video.

Originally posted on April 29, 2010 @ 7:17 pm