Ooyala, the company that hosts all of the videos on The Verge, is releasing a new version of their player in the next month or so. The player should provide better support for more mobile devices and provide a smoother overall performance. In advance of the release of the player, they have given us early access to test it and approved us giving y'all a place to view it so that we could get your feedback on the player as well. We've created a (fairly crude) test page where we have the new player embedded and would like as many of y'all to check it out as possible.

The test page is located here.

Once you've checked it out, please let us know your thoughts in the comments of this post. To help us categorize the feedback for Ooyala, when you leave your feedback, let us know what type of hardware you are running (as many mobile devices as possible!), what OS and version you're running and what browser you're using. Additional information that might be helpful are carrier, connection speed, WiFi or not, etc. Provide as many details about your set up and the performance of the player as possible so we can pass the feedback on to Ooyala.

A few things to note:

1. Ooyala has enabled HTML5 support for desktop browsers during this beta period, but it may not be a part of the final product. Please check it out on your desktops and provide as much feedback on the performance of the player as possible, but keep this in mind as you do.
2. HTML5 will not work in Firefox
3. The design of both the test page and the player are not at all a final product. You'll notice our fonts are not loading on the test page and that the player's color scheme has not been set. All of this will change as testing continues and we get closer to Ooyala's full launch of the player. This initial testing period is to help Ooyala gauge the performance of the new player.
4. We'll be swapping in a new video at some point today (most likely a 90 Seconds On The Verge video) so you'll have a better chance to see the differences between the current player and the new one. I'll update this post when we do this.

We'll do our best to answer as many questions y'all may have in the comments and we'll keep working to update the test page (changing the video, designing the player, etc.) in the coming weeks. We'll post updates in the forums when there is an update to the test page. Have at it, you guys!

EDIT: One additional note as I've seen some comments that people have been seeing the Flash version of the new player when they were expecting the HTML5 version: HTML5 is not the default player on any device except for iOS. You will still get served the Flash version of the player if you have Flash installed on your device. The HTML5 version will only get served in Flash-less environments. Also, please keep in mind that desktop support for HTML5 may not be included in the final launch from Ooyala.