Change 285075 had a related patch set uploaded (by TheDJ):
OOjs UI based popup for playing small videojs thumbnails

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/285075

Reflow sounds neat for things not embedded in a table or otherwise awkward situation, feels tricky to generalize.

Here's a crazy idea: pop-up dialog that's movable and resizable so you can picture in picture while scrolling the rest of the page. Whaaaaaaaaaat? :)

Rather than crazy picture-in-picture, I would more seriously recommend an 'open in new tab' button on the inline playback, that would open the target File: page with URL parameters to ping it to the current time position and perhaps enable autoplay if playback is currently ongoing.

That also resolves our 'no way to get at the file info page yet' problem.

In T133500#2233629, @brion wrote:

Reflow sounds neat for things not embedded in a table or otherwise awkward situation, feels tricky to generalize.

I think the logic to implement reflow (if we want it) with a fallback to popup if no space, is pretty simple:

• on click:
  • find the parent of the video
  • check its available width and height (if set) to guess if expansion should work
  • if _that_ is below the threshold, open popup
  • else, expand the player in place
• also, add to controls a "shrink me back" button?

Another possibility is to always show the player at the size requested for the thumbnail, but to allow the controls to overflow the player cleanly and workably, perhaps by absolute-positioning them just outside the player instead of allowing them to be constrained/clipped.

I'm not sure how hard that would be to implement, but I think some CSS hackery would be most of it.

Here's a quick mockup made by cut-n-pasting in gimp ;)

Change 285075 abandoned by TheDJ:
[WIP] OOjs UI based popup for playing small videojs thumbnails

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/285075

Given the resolution of T226319, do we want to keep this as a blocker to release or can we shuffle it into "soon"-land?

@Jdforrester-WMF T226371: Beta player slow at loading many videos in Firefox might require us to dive back into one of these proposed solutions, but for basic playback I do not consider this a blocker at this point.

WFM.

Of the 3 options, "Reimplement with OOjs UI" is the best, IMO. Showing the videos in Media Viewer is overkill since most of our videos are small and don't come close to filling the screen, same for open in new tab. "Enlarge the video in page" will reek havoc with article layout. If you're going to fall back to a pop-up anyway (in cases where there isn't room for expanding), why not just keep it simple and use a pop-up by default? If I remember correctly, the old player had a config variable for setting the pop-up threshold (vs. just playing the thumbnail version). Seems like that would be good to implement as well.