[bisRepetita]

> it obscures the actual content when you're interacting with the controls (a problem that's particularly acute on smaller screens)

What's the right trade-off here in your mind then? Leave the controls always-on/visible? On a small screen, it takes a lot of real estate (except in portrait mode), and small UI controls are a pain to use so you need to make them big enough. I struggle with this, I really don't know what is the right trade-off here.

[rakoo]

> On a small screen, it takes a lot of real estate

That's why the full-screen mode exists

[Thorrez]

thrdbndndn was only advocating for always-on controls in non-fullscreen mode.

One reason people might enter fullscreen mode is to avoid seeing distracting things on the screen. Controls might be distracting.

[bisRepetita]

in full screen mode, even after people turn their phone 90 degrees, you have not much space for visible control on a 16x9 video.

[thrdbndndn]

> except in portrait mode

Portrait mode is exactly what I have in my mind. You have plenty of places on the bottom of the video canvas.

For YouTube at least, you only has full-screen mode when in landscape anyway.

[TaylorAlexander]

On iPhone the YouTube app will do full-screen in portrait mode. Grab the video title (under the video) with your finger and pull down. The rest of the UI goes away and you just get the video shown in the middle of the screen with large black areas above and below the screen.

This is besides your point but I thought I would mention it. I like controls that hide in full screen mode regardless of portrait or landscape because you want to focus on the content.

[joseda-hg]

Not anymore, you can force portrait fullscreen In desktop for example: If you go into a vertical video with a regular "/watch?v=" URL, you can see vertical format video with regular controls

There was some way to get the same effect in android, but I can't recall right now