Video Player

The player is where you actually watch things. It handles movies, TV episodes, live TV, and recordings, and adapts its controls to what you are watching.

Playback controls

Move the mouse or tap the screen to bring up the control bar. It hides again while you watch.

The two skip buttons use a double arrow, and the two chapter buttons use an arrow with a bar. That difference is deliberate, so you can tell at a glance whether a button jumps a fixed number of seconds or moves to the next chapter.

The chapter buttons only appear when the thing you are watching has chapters, and when you have chapters turned on.

The progress bar

The progress bar shows how far through you are. Drag it, or click anywhere on it, to jump to that point.

Hovering over the bar shows the time at that position, along with the name of the chapter you are hovering over. On files that have preview thumbnails, you also get a picture of that moment.

Chapter markers

When a movie or episode has chapters, they appear as dots along the progress bar. Dots on the part you have not watched yet are teal, and dots on the part you have already watched are light, so they stay visible against both halves of the bar.

Hover over the bar anywhere between two markers and the chapter name appears, not just when you land exactly on a dot.

Scrub preview thumbnails

Preview thumbnails are the small images that appear above the progress bar as you drag or hover, so you can find a scene without guessing.

Norri creates them from the video itself. The first time you open something, it generates them in the background, which can take a short while on a long film. The Extract Trickplay Thumbnails background task fills in the rest of your library over time, so previews are ready before you ever open a title. See Library Maintenance for how background tasks are scheduled.

Chapters

Many films include chapter markers. Norri reads them from the file and uses them for the chapter buttons, the markers on the progress bar, and the chapter name that appears when you hover.

Not all chapters are useful. Some files carry chapters that are nothing more than timecodes, or a generic list along the lines of “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2”, and “Chapter 3”. Those add clutter without telling you anything, so Norri hides them by default and shows chapters only when they have real names.

You can change that. Go to Settings → Playback and pick one of:

Norri never changes the file. This setting only controls what you see.

Audio, subtitles, and quality

Open the Settings button in the control bar to switch the audio track, choose subtitles, or change quality and playback speed during playback.

Your language preferences decide what gets picked automatically each time you start something new. For how automatic selection works, along with subtitle types and language settings, see Audio & Subtitle Tracks.

Playback settings

Go to Settings → Playback to control how the player behaves. Alongside the audio and subtitle preferences, you will find:

• Chapter markers, covering the three chapter options above
• Scrub preview thumbnails, which turns the hover previews on or off

Each setting can follow the server default, or you can override it. An override applies to you on the device you are using, so you can keep previews on at your desk and off on a slower machine without affecting anyone else.

Live TV

Live channels use the same player, with a few differences. There is no seeking, no chapters, and no preview thumbnails, because a live broadcast has no fixed length. A LIVE indicator replaces the progress time, and volume, subtitles, quality, picture in picture, and fullscreen all work as normal.