Switched player.tech to tech_, to promote it as private

[heff]

closes #2060

Just changes player.tech to player.tech_ wherever it's used, because it's important to promote that the tech is a private reference that plugin authors shouldn't be using. This was mangled in 4.x, so should be ok to change.

[gkatsev]

Sounds good to me.

[moay]

Just one question concerning this. How do I access a "non standard" tech function in a component with the tech being private?

I want to access a function of a custom tech which is not a default function like volume() or src(). I built a component which can access the player internally like this: this.player_, but if I try to access the function like this: this.player_.myFunction() it doesn't work. Neither does this.player_.tech.myFunction() (still on rc82).

How to eiter publish the function from within the tech or to access the function via some other way from the component?

Thanks. :-)

EDIT: Read the Component docs and I'm now using this.player() instead of this.player_. But this still doesn't solve the problem... I can now access the function, but with the tech being private, this isn't the right way to do it - is it?

[heff]

How are you adding a function to the player so that this.player_.myFunction() isn't working? That should work, and is ok to do because it's a private var of `this`. If you have a specific feature you want to access on a tech, you should submit and issue about it so we can find a way to make it work the same across all techs the same way. If we start adding tech-specific functions, it breaks the model where any plugin can work with any tech.

[moay]

Here is the basic tech (very reduced) setup:

(function() {
    var Tech = videojs.getComponent('Tech');
    var MyTech = videojs.extends(Tech, {
        myFunction: function(){
            return something;
        }
    });
    videojs.registerComponent('MyTech', MyTech);
})();

Now in my Component (simple button, ES6), I can't access this function via this.player().myFunction(). In rc82, I can do this.player().tech.myFunction() (or this.player().tech_.myFunction() for the future), but if I get the purpose of the tech being made private, this is not how it's supposed to be used. Maybe I'm just not clever enough... ;-) Is there some other way to publish a method from the tech?

[gkatsev]

In 5.0, the tech no longer has a reference to the player. But the player should still have tech_ available. And just because it's private and discourage to use, doesn't mean that you shouldn't necessarily use it. It depends on the particular usecase.
Also, for contrib-hls we ended up adding a reference to the player with the name of the tech for us to use. player.hls would reference the hls tech. Though, we're transitioning away from a tech for it and to source handlers.

[moay]

Okay, thanks. :)

[heff]

Please don't use tech_ until you've at least submitted an issue about why you needed to use it and what the player is lacking. I haven't seen a usecase yet where we shouldn't be looking into how to expose the information at the player level, in a way that's consistent between techs (even if it's just reporting that the info/feature isn't supported).

The consistency between techs is actually growing in importance for video.js users (and users of video.js plugins), so we need to keep being religious about that.

[mmcc]

lgtm