The original note, as written at the time
ON VIDEO PLAYERS. Video players should have a grid layout where multiple videos can be played at once without the window frames. There should be an ability to zoom and stretch the windows flexibly.
Ongoing development
Video players should have a grid layout in which several videos play at once with no window frames, and each cell can be zoomed and stretched freely.
The window frame is the thing to remove. Every player is a rectangle inside a rectangle, with a title bar and a control strip, and a wall of six of them is a wall of chrome with small pictures in it.
A grid without frames is closer to how a person actually monitors things. Security, broadcast, editing, a lecture with four camera angles, a classroom of remote students: in all of those the content is the same kind of object and the interface should be a mosaic rather than a stack of windows.
The stretch requirement is the interesting part, because it is the opposite of what video software does. Players preserve aspect ratio rigidly, which is correct for cinema and wrong for a grid, where a cell may need to be tall and narrow because that is the shape of the thing in it — a portrait phone video, a chat, a document.
So the honest version letterboxes nothing and instead offers two modes: fill, which crops, and fit, which pads, and lets each cell differ. Six cells, six decisions.
The control that nobody builds and everybody needs is a master timeline. If six things are playing, the user wants them synchronised, or deliberately staggered, and there should be one transport bar rather than six.
A grid of videos is a workspace, not a playlist. The interface should admit that.