A truly terrible plugin, really badly coded

I have been patiently waiting for 17 months for Apptha to update their Video Gallery plugin and every time I ask they say it will be two months.

Here was the initial feedback from our developers in December 2015 – a year later and nothing has been updated:

For starters the Player is not HTML5, but Flash-based

The Video Gallery file is 370 lines of php code (with some small html/js) and half of the file is an ugly mess of spaghetti code.
Not only this, but Apptha/Contus are doing some dark magic stuff with the loading of the actual player, which is totally undocumented and it’s badly approached.

From my quick review it seems every video file has a file type which is coded via a cryptic number – with possible values from 1 to 5.
One number defines a YouTube/DailyMotion video, another uploaded file, another custom url, legacy flash based video streaming type & embed video.

So there are various types of conditions and 4 different approaches to the video display:
from using one type of specialised tag, that is subsequently replaced via js – for the embed type
to using another for YouTube, again replaced via js
to using 3rd tag for uploaded image or flash streaming, again later replaced via js
to using a 4th tag which is similar to the YouTube tag but not quite, and again later replaced via js
A total mess.
Not to mention that the behaviour of all this is changing depending on whether the widget is loaded on mobile, or on desktop.
From what I see sometimes more than one tag is used – this specifically is not a bug, it’s called progressive enhancement and it’s needed to support various Browsers and environments.
Either way, the approach is bad even in this regard, as the lack of basic documentation & conventions within the code is annoying.
There is no basic explanation why certain decisions are made.
We had a very hard time just to apply some basic responsive styles for the player – as we had to write 30-40 lines of CSS hacks to get the player at least in a basic shape.
In short, Apptha should supply a Video Player that looks and behaves more like the one in YouTube – based on HTML5.
But even if they do, they won’t replace the underlying code of the widget – so there is a high risk, that they will send even worse/tweaked version of the widget.