Video.js

Video.js is an open source HTML5 video player under heavy development that advertises its great possibility to apply custom css skins for both the HTML5 and the flash player (and other technologies) which serves as a fallback player (“Skin once, use everywhere”).

The player fixes cross-browser incompatibilities, bugs and inconsistencies and adds some features that haven’t been implemented by all browser vendors, yet, like subtitles and the ability to let the video play in fullscreen.
Many platforms are supported, those who didn’t implement any HTML5 feature or just a specific feature, yet, fall back to a leightweight flash player (really leightweight, less than 10k — you can test the player here):

videojs_compatibility
The JavaScript API is consistent between all players and allows to control the player in one way so you don’t have to write code again for every new technology. You can also develop your own plugins/extensions easily.

Although this player has some very nice features it does lack the one I already mentioned in the previous posts: It is not capable of synchronizing two or more videos – but again: that should not be the problem to implement, the JavaScript API allows to control the whole player and the synchronizing code of my own HTML5 player can be reused.

All in all we have to consider this as a component in the new engage player. It is very feature-rich and those features that aren’t provided can be implemented on our own because of the JavaScript API and because it’s an open source project. Besides the license is the LGPLv3 so this shouldn’t be a problem.

About these ads
This entry was posted in API, Frameworks, HTML5, JavaScript, Libraries, Technology, Video and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to Video.js

  1. cab938 says:

    Does this mean that to support Moz one will need to dual encode video to h264/webm? Is there a plan to upgrade the default workflows to change encoding to do this?

  2. CallToPower says:

    Yes, the encoding profiles need to be updated but that’s no problem, we already did this for some tests and for the new trim player (MH-8100).

  3. Shane says:

    Mozilla just recently added h.264 support to Vista and 7 by hooking into the MSFT Media framework I believe. I’m not sure on the details, but I think it’s enabled in FF 18. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/webrtc-enabled-h-264mp3-support-in-win-7-on-by-default-metro-ui-for-windows-8-more-firefox-development-highlights/

    So maybe you won’t have to encode both for very long. They’re still working on Mac and Linux support…

  4. Pingback: Player events | Matterhorn Engage Player Dev Camp

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s