[Feature]: Player UI improvements, next/previous buttons and fullscreen repositioning

[lelam183]

Type of request

Enhancement (improve existing UI/UX)

What problem would this solve?

On mobile the player buttons are close together, making it easy to misclick, especially the fullscreen button. There's also no way to skip to the next or previous video from the player itself, and it doesn't work with browser/hardware media controls either.

What would you like to see?

For both desktop and mobile:

• Add previous and next video buttons to the player, compatible with browser media controls so keyboard/hardware buttons work too.

For mobile:

• Move the play/pause button to the center of the screen, with next and previous buttons on either side.
• Move the fullscreen button above the seekbar so it's easier to tap without misclicking.

For desktop:

• Keep the current layout as is, just add the previous and next buttons.

Area

Frontend (web app)

[Priveetee]

Hello! I'm on it :)

[Priveetee]

Thanks for the detailed suggestion.

I shipped the navigation part in #124:

• previous/next buttons are now available on the desktop/tablet player
• browser and hardware media controls now support previous/next through Media Session where supported
• the player runtime was also stabilized around the Vidstack issues we hit while adding this

I’m closing this for now because I won’t ship the proposed mobile centered layout in its current form.

While testing the player changes, I ran into too many Vidstack/runtime issues around the player overlay and control updates, including picture-in-picture target crashes and repeated React update-depth warnings. Before changing the mobile control layout more aggressively, I’d rather keep the current mobile player stable.

There is also a UI reason: the current mobile player intentionally keeps the larger bottom control layout. Moving play/pause into the middle of the video with previous/next on both sides made the overlay feel heavier and conflicted with the current mobile tap targets.

The fullscreen repositioning also needs a safer workaround to avoid overlap and regressions around the seekbar/fullscreen controls. Maybe I’ll revisit it later if I find a clean workaround, but for now I’m closing this with the previous/next and Media Session parts done in #124.

[lelam183]

I see, thank you for the hard work as always! Previous and next buttons are already a great improvement.

Also noticed my phone is running cooler with better resource usage after the update. On the tablet though, I'm still seeing some heat and resource usage issues during video playback, I still need to observe it more to confirm if it's caused by the app.