seekTo value and result mismatched

[whitegrey]

If you use seekTo to set a value, the result may be wrong by 1s.

case in point:

seeking to 0:05 in a 148 second video means calling seekTo( 0.033783783783783786 ). onDuration will immediately return {played: 0.0337837775564004}. I'm assuming this is because React Player only sets to the 6th or 7th digit?

The problem is 0.0337837775564004 multiplied by 148s (video length) returns 4.999999078347259. Which youtube rounds down to 4s.

In other words, if you try to set time to 5s, you will instead get 4s.

On a side note, would you consider adding the options to set seek via seconds elapsed? It may just be me, but I feel it's a much more intuitive method of working with seek than percent played.

[cookpete]

Your specific issue could be YouTube adding one second to the reported duration (possibly so videos between 0 and 1 second long appears as 1 second long). The reason fraction is used is because we only know the duration after onDuration is called, so the app would have to gather the duration into state (or somehow know it beforehand) before it is able to safely seek anywhere. With a fraction you can seek without needed to know the duration (because 0.5 will always be halfway through the media, etc).

I agree that is seems less intuitive, but unfortunately the different players make their durations available at different times during the loading sequence.

Perhaps seekTo could be clever and handle both. Seek using a fraction if the value given is less than 1, otherwise seek using seconds.

[lostbard]

So what happens when you do a seekTo(0.5) meaning you want to seek to 0.5 seconds ?

[cookpete]

So what happens when you do a seekTo(0.5) meaning you want to seek to 0.5 seconds ?

I did consider this when implementing but figured the chance of someone ever wanting to seek to 0.x seconds was pretty much zero.

If you really wanted to (and the player SDK supported such specific seeking), you could use getInternalPlayer() and manually call seekTo (or whatever method is supported) on the internal player that ReactPlayer uses.

[kalpesh4307]

@cookpete how can i use getInternalPlayer() and manually call seekTo in my video modal??

[waynebloss]

Hello and thanks for your work on this player.

Everything is working great so far, but I really needed to be able to seek by 0.1 seconds for a video editor that I'm building. Overloading the seekTo method to do 2 separate functions by looking for fractions between '0' and '1' seems to go against best practices for making a clear and concise programming interface.

Would you consider a pull request that normalizes this behavior into separate functions?

[amanChaturvedi7]

@cookpete according to https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-player documentation, if we pass second argument for type as "seconds", It should override the default behaviour of considering value between 0 and 1 as fractions. But this isn't happening. I am trying to do player.seekTo(0.4, "seconds") and it's taking me to 0.4 times the duration of the video.