Visibility of Video Player Controls

Hi everyone,

I’m currently exploring the new Evolve and really looking forward to seeing how it evolves over time, especially as new components and features are added. At the moment, there are still quite a few elements from the legacy version that aren’t available yet, so I’m excited to see how the platform develops.

I have one question regarding the video player controls.

As far as I can tell, the video controls are only displayed after the user clicks on the video. Personally, I find this a bit unfortunate. Depending on the first frame of the video, the play button may not stand out very well, so it isn’t always immediately obvious that the content is actually a video.

If the video controls were visible from the start, this would be much clearer for the learner and would improve discoverability.

Is there already an option to keep the video controls visible before playback starts, or is this something that might be considered for a future update?

Certainly will bear that in mind. Evolve uses VideoJS player which is getting a big update this year - so we’re holding off on any non-essential work to the video player functionality until that’s out.

In the meantime you can:

  • set a poster image for the video that has a better contrast with the controls
  • change the style of the ‘big play button’ in the theme to have more suitable colors
  • for the Media element itself you can override the ‘big play button’ style at element level