Looking for a working web video player

Question

After several years working with commercial and custom Flash video players, such as Flowplayer and jwplayer, I decided to open my work to html5. I like the idea of having a Flash impersonation of html5, so I tried medialements.js, video.js and jplayer. None of them are production ready and they all fail to meet my goal, which is playing a video on a webpage, desktop and mobile, live and vod.

Does anyone has a suggestion for a working web video player, apart from the commercial ones?

TIA

greg

Answer 1

I can get to what you are saying. Videojs is a leader in HTML5 video and considered state of the art by many though I think it falls short on some aspects especially for iOS/Android and Live streaming. Here is a list that compares some common actors of the market.

After much time playing with the different players available I decided to build my own HTML5 video jQuery based player. I learned so much while doing so and if you are planning on re-using it for your projects it will be much faster to tweak your own player rather than trying to build something up on a player someone else built. Now doing so requires you like JavaScript and are happy to deal with the cross browser testing. This article can give you a place to start. Digging in further would require you take on board the W3C spec.

Live streaming in HTML5 video is limited today: HLS for iOS and Android > 4.1 and coming in fast MPEG DASH (it has a JS lib for live and on demand here). If you want to cover a large audience for live video streaming you still need to consider flash.