Suggested Solutions to Problems with the Current Adobe Video Interface

An earlier post of mine suggesting improvements to your interface for media clips has been ‘upvoted’ in this forum, and I was hoping to see some of the problems that I had referred to fixed in the latest update that Adobe has announced, but apparently they have not been (my current version is 2024.001.20604|64 bit). I’m hoping the present update to my complaints can be upvoted as well. Or if that is not sufficient to bring them to the attention of those making the relevant decisions, then please send them to those individuals, or tell me how to do so.

               It may help if I explain briefly why I need the changes that I request. I use Acrobat to present a huge number of audio and video clips to fellow linguists who I am attempting to persuade how they should best analyze sentences in deaf sign languages. For this attempt to be successful, they must be able to see that my analysis works for all the sentences in my large database. They will never view all of them, but the analysis must work for any video they choose at random from the many hundreds that I will make available. And to study them with sufficient care, two video capabilities are necessary: (1) viewing the videos one frame at a time; and (2) having the video remain on the last frame when finished, instead of disrupting their concentration by having it suddenly jump elsewhere (my videos last only about 3 to 5 seconds per sentence). Both of these abilities existed in Quicktime, but as you know, its PC version has a security problem which has led you to work on your own MP4-based interface as a substitute. (The Mac itself defaults to Quicktime for MP4s.)

                 Ability #2 does exist in your current interface, for which many thanks. Or rather, it exists about half the time. Randomly, about half the time it jumps to a black screen at the end of each video, which I assume is simply a bug that can be fixed.

                 But ability #1 does not exist at all at this time in the Acrobat video interface. There’s a cursor that could someday be dragged to provide a partial substitute, but it has no effect at present. I presume that function will eventually be activated, but frame-by-frame viewing with the left and right arrow keys as Quicktime does would be much easier for users to control with precision. And easier to concentrate on the videos themselves than having to devote half one’s attention to managing the cursor at the same time.

                 Then there’s the question of embedding vs. linking. The above problems all occur with the Add Video tool, which embeds the videos. Embedding (if it did not have the above-mentioned problems) would be a superior choice since users would not have to co-ordinate one or more folders of video files with the PDFs. With linking they would have to choose a video player that has both the above-mentioned abilities, and such video players are rare. MPC-HC is the only one I’ve found so far, but its frame-by-frame viewing requires the user to press Ctrl simultaneously with the Left and Right Arrows. As I remember my earlier testing of Microsoft Media Player, I thought it remained on the last frame, but in my most recent testing I see that it currently does not. As for  frame-by-frame viewing with the arrow keys, well, you just have to know the trick to make it work. The trick is to start by dragging the cursor. If you’ve done that just once – even a short distance – frame-by frame with the arrow keys suddenly becomes available. And yes, it will continue to show the last frame if it is dragged there, but the usefulness of that feature occurs only when playing the video at normal speed and continuing to mentally process what one has just seen.

                 An entirely separate embedding vs. linking issue concerns how difficult it can be to embed vs. link them. Embedding is MUCH more time-consuming. Step 1: Click ‘Add Video’. Step 2: Draw a box around the area you want the video icon to occupy.  Step 3: Navigate to the video file you want to show and double-click it. Step 4: Be sure to remember to un-check ‘Snap to video proportions’. (If you forget this step, the icon you choose later for triggering the video will not exactly fill the space you drew the box for earlier.) Step 5: Click on ‘Show Advanced Options’. Step 6: At least for my videos, choose ‘Play in floating window’. Steps 7 and 8: Drag the cursor over each default video size (width and height) and key in the dimensions you want. Step 9: Check ‘Create poster from file’. Step 10: Navigate to the appropriate icon and double-click it. Then Step 11: Press Okay. Another problem (perhaps the worst part!) is this: if you embed the wrong video by mistake there currently appears to be no way to fix your mistake and you must start all over. This can be a huge job: The PDF I’m preparing at present plays 39 audio clips and 179 video clips. (Was there an obvious solution to this problem that I missed?)

                 Except for the inability to delete a mistake (which you will surely fix eventually unless I was mistaken about it anyway), I think there’s a simple solution to all these problems: just permit us to set defaults. For example, you could have a checkbox somewhere that lets us choose the  current values (whatever one has set them to) as defaults for future embeddings until cleared later. Or maybe you could just let whatever choices the user makes simply stay there until changed by the user him/herself. This is how your checkbox ‘Snap to video proportions’ works already. And it's already how one of the dialog windows in the linking scenario works.

                 Turning now to the linking scenario, it needs just 5 simple steps, all but one of which are simple clicks. Step 1: Left-click on the desired icon (already present in all my PDFs), thereby selecting that object. Step 2: Right-click that icon to open its context menu. Step 3: Click on ‘Create link’. Step 4: Click ‘Next’ in the resulting  dialog window (this is the one I mentioned that keeps as defaults the choices made earlier – choices that concern the appearance of the icon and what happens when it is clicked: ‘Open a file’ in my case). Step 5: Navigate to the desired video file and double-click it. That’s all. There’s no need even to click Okay. And since the first four steps all consist of simple clicks, each step in this scenario is much simpler in itself than those for embedding, such as navigating to both the video file and the icon, and the whole drill of dragging over a pre-specified width and height to select each in turn and then keying in the desired new values (which I could have broken into separate sub-steps). All these matters  are simply determined by the video file itself and its chosen video player when it is linked. The current Add Video approach to embedding will take me many days to implement given the hundreds of video files I have to deal with.

                 I estimate that this current linking approach takes about one-tenth as long as the embedding approach via Add Video does. It is so easy that one would like to have the best of both worlds, as follows: From the embedded solution, we’d like to keep the freedom from  dealing with one or more separate external folders and the desirability of remaining on the last frame when the video ends (please don’t change that!). And from the linking solution, we could keep everything just as it is now, with the slight difference that the end result would actually be embedded. The main difficulty is how to label this new approach to avoid confusion.

                  One could have a choice labeled ‘Embed link’ in the context menu next to the choice of ‘Create link’ that already exists. This might draw criticism as a self-contradiction since by the very definition of the terms, a link could not be embedded. But people would understand it, and you could rationalize it as linking to it now in order to embed it once we have it. Or maybe in the dialog window I mentioned that’s already there (the one entitled ‘Create Link’) there could be a checkbox next to the ‘Open a file’ choice that’s labeled ‘Embed this file’. That would avoid, or at least disguise, the seeming self-contradiction. My view is that this enhanced functionality and simplicity should outweigh  any linguistic purism of trying to honor this only recently emerged distinction opposing linking to embedding.

                 Or if you really want to make it all logical, you could address a current problem with the Add Video tool. At present a writer of PDFs is able to discover only after the fact that the Add Video tool embeds videos instead of linking to them. Shouldn’t writers of PDFs be told this up front? And in the same window with that choice they could choose whether to select all the display properties of the video file specifically,  or let them be determined by the video file itself together with the video player chosen, no doubt worded more briefly.  Unless there’s something I don’t understand, it seems to me that any of the four arrangements dictated by these two choices is a feasible combination. But my vote is for the ‘Embed this file’ check box in the ‘Create Link’ dialog window. The straightforward meaning of the phrase ‘Open a file’ would already dictate that the file would open in its own floating window. And it seems much simpler for you to implement than all you would have to do to bring more logic to the Add Video tool.

                 In closing, allow me to point out that while these recommendations are tailored to my particular case, the increase in functionality would surely be a boon to many others. As to the particular feature of remaining on the last frame when the video file ends, it seems to me it should be the natural choice anyway. It is fact the choice made by both Apple in their design of Quicktime and by the widely admired MPC-HC video player.