The Latest Thinking player for research video. Structured, beautiful, and at home on any page.
Latest Thinking publishes research as video: scientists explaining their own work, question by question, in their own words. Generic video players treat that content like any other clip. The LT Player is built around it instead. A talk has structure, so the player has chapters. Science is international, so captions are first-class. Knowledge wants to travel, so sharing and embedding are built in, from Latest Thinking pages to any website that installs/embeds the player.
And because a player represents the content it plays, the LT Player is designed to be beautiful: a calm, carefully crafted surface that gets out of the way of the person speaking.
A proprietary web video player, shipped as the npm package @latest-thinking/lt-player. Every player instance is fully described by one configuration object: the content it plays, the controls it shows, and the capabilities it enables. Consumers configure the player; they never modify it.
Version 3 is in active development and published as a beta on the npm next channel.
| # | Document | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Overview | What the LT Player is, core terms, vocabulary rules |
| 2 | Contexts | Where the player runs and the constraints each context imposes |
| 3 | Architecture | Target structure, module boundaries, capability module contract, styling strategy |
| 4 | Media engine | The Video.js 10 layer kit, the LT Player's place on top, composition rules |
| 5 | Layouts | Landscape and portrait: definitions, shared behavior, divergences |
| 6 | Core player | The always-on baseline every instance provides |
| 7 | Capability model | Availability, enablement, the merge cascade, defaults |
| 8 | Shorts | The feed module wrapping the portrait player |
| 9 | Theming | Design tokens, light and dark, fonts |
| 10 | Capability: chapters | Timeline segments and navigation |
| 11 | Capability: captions | Subtitle rendering and selection |
| 12 | Capability: speed | Playback rate control |
| 13 | Capability: share | Share controls, including external page triggers |
| 14 | Capability: context panel | The context panel surface |
| 15 | Config | The instance configuration shape, merge semantics, validation |
| 16 | Storage | The browser storage key, schema, versioning, and behavior for the user state |
| 17 | Page API | How a hosting page controls the player |
| 18 | Demo data | The video library, configuration shapes, and dummy feed; media from the bucket |
| 19 | Library | A dedicated page per demo video: player, document, copyable resource links |
This documentation is the specification of the player. It is versioned with the code, reviewed like code, and binding: implementation follows the approved documents, and a change in behavior starts with a change here. Every document carries a status badge under its title (skeleton, draft, or approved), and only approved documents bind implementation.
The specification is written to be implemented from, by people and by AI agents alike: behavior is described precisely enough that an implementer never needs to guess, and when a detail is not yet decided, the document says so explicitly instead of staying silent.
