I released my first update version of Able Player today, along with the major update to the Able Player WordPress plugin.

This isn’t a particularly ambitious release of Able Player, but it does resolve a lot of long-standing bugs, modernizes some of the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and cleans up a variety of issues in the package.

I’ll be continuing with the practice of keeping the Able Player documentation in place on Github, so you can read the complete changelog on the Able Player documentation site.

Learning more about Able Player

As part of the process of doing this release, I went through every part of Able Player carefully. Not with the intent to make changes, but with the intent to understand what’s going on. In that process, I learned about some really amazing features that I’d never really addressed before.

The automatic transcript feature is incredibly powerful; the way it takes all the existing text tracks and combines them into a single navigable transcript is very cool.

I discovered the existence of the Video Transcript Sorter, which is a tool for editing your existing text tracks in the browser. It doesn’t have any saving capabilities, but as a way to quickly adjust the order or detailed timing of something, it’s quite impressive.

I’m definitely looking forward to continuing to move this project forward!