As somebody who has hosted videos on web pages with JS and Flash players at a time where broadband wasn't as broad as it is today, I must say I don't understand what the problem is with getting an embedded player to work. Whether it's Mastodon, some blog or a commercial web site with a product demo. If it the video is not hosted on one of the few big video platforms, it's unlikely to just play when I press play.
Taking a long time to buffer is one thing with my slow internet access. But the problems more usually are:
- Buffering 1 %, starting to play but never loading the rest of the video,
- displaying a buffered bar but not playing what's supposedly already downloaded,
- switching resolution for no good reason, then taking a long time to buffer that new video,
- stopping playback for no apparent reason,
- sound out of sync,
- never starting anything and I'm not sure whether it's trying to load something, is buffering, has timed out, never worked for anybody in the first place, …
Even with a browser that supports all the fancy and unnecessary JavaScript, I usually end up downloading the video and playing it in VLC or mpv. It's on me that I keep trying to use the embedded player first. It just feels like it _should_ work so I can't accept that it doesn't more often than it does.
