Dear YouTube,
you have amused us greatly with your SNL clip videos (which get pulled down due to legal threats) and your “Snakes on a Plane” trailer (which got pulled), and all your other and future videos that will be replaced with a This video has been removed due to terms of use violation
message. You cover the full gamut from videos of people geeking out to Guitar Hero on camera to videos of random people dancing to crappy music on camera. All the while you do this using Flash video.
I’m not going to make a judgement call on your decision to use Flash. It is what you chose and it is what I shall tolerate. However, you have made one annoying mistake. You spent all this time coding the site and coding this embedable flv player, yet you forgot one easy to implement thing. One thing that your competitor, Google Video, does do. One thing that *I* could code in five minutes for you guys: volume control.
Please add this feature. Your “all or none” volume button is very presumptuous in its assumption that your video is the only media I have playing on my computer. It’s not. I do not like having to adjust my system volume to view your video at a tolerable level when my system volume is perfectly fine the way it is. Please resolve.
Your viewer,
Mike Nowak
OMG LET’S START A PETITION, NOWAK!