player studies · one engine, four skins
all four are the same twelve lines of control logic wearing different clothes. click, drag, use the keyboard — space to play, arrows to seek, m to mute, f for fullscreen. they work independently; starting one pauses the others.
pick the one that's right and we'll build it properly, then save it as a skill so it's the house player forever.
filed, not posted
Bone stock, black ink, SMPTE timecode running at 24fps, metadata under a hairline. It doesn't look like a website player — it looks like a record of something. This is the one that would sit correctly next to an archive.org item page.
built to be operated
Ruler ticks down the scrubber, a red playhead, timecode big enough to read across a room. This is the one that says the person who made this site cuts things for a living. Ultramarine on near-black, so it belongs to the same world as everything else we've built.
the type is the interface
No chrome exists until you touch it. The word play is set enormous and composited into the picture in hard light, so the footage lights the letters — the same trick from the drift study. The scrubber is one hairline at the very bottom edge that fattens when you reach for it. This is the show-off, and it's the most you.
one line, nothing else
The restrained one. A mark, a rule, a number. Plain mm:ss instead of timecode, because SMPTE on something this quiet would be showing off. This is the player that disappears — right when the work should be the only thing anyone notices.
the video didn't load — check the source url at the top of the script