Viewing What's the best HTML5 Video Player?

What's the best HTML5 Video Player?



User: Christopher 9 years ago
Hey, it's been awhile since I've been here. I implemented Sublime Video into my site (cleetche.com) months ago after checking out the competition and finding it to be the best looking and easiest to implement. But maybe because of that, they've since been bought out by Dailymotion and development has stopped. I've been running into problems with playback and need to jump ship. What's the best, most modern-looking, most reliable HTML5 player out there? I've done some googling (JW player, JS, Flowplayer...) but would like to hear from some of you.

Chris

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rMBP 15", 2.6 Ghz, 16 GB RAM, OS X 10.11.6, with 27" Thunderbolt Cinema Display

www.cleetche.com
User: Roddy 9 years ago
JW Longtail and Flowplayer have been around for quite a while and used to have free versions which were reasonably easy to use. They are both very commercial now with lots of features that most of us don't need and can't justify paying for.

If I was a film maker without a six figure budget I would seriously consider Vimeo Pro which allows customization and branding at a real world price. Judging by the number and type of film makers who use it, it would be worth taking a long , hard look at it.

The Mediaelement player, which is the basis of most of the EverWeb media widgets, is rock solid, reliable and free for those who want to host their own video files. It has been my player of choice for several years now. Like all of the above, it is not pure HTML5 since it has to have a flash fallback option to cater for geriatric browsers.

My latest project is creating a section of the EverWeb Codebox site to illustrate the use of HTML5 elements for page layout to vastly improve SEO. One of the widgets incorporates the HTML5 video tag in a figure element to allow a caption/heading and text description of movie content to be in the same container as the movie so that the SEO spiders will "see" the relationship between them in a way that was not possible with HTML4.

These widgets are aimed at more advanced users who understand how SEO works and actually want their website content to be found! Using the figure element allows a figcaption(s) to be relatively positioned anywhere on the page but still be "seen" as being a description of the content of the video tag by the SE spiders. This opens up many possibilities for custom design and product branding.

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Roddy

Website: http://everwebwidgets.com
Contact: http://everwebwidgets.com/ewWidgets-home/contact.html
NOTE: I am an EverWeb user and NOT affiliated with EverWeb! Any opinions expressed in this forum are my own.
User: Christopher 9 years ago
Well now that I've had over a week to explore and experiment, time to report my findings:

My videos were stopping and failing to properly load and I thought the problem was my html5 browser. Turns out, it was my server: GoDaddy! When I signed up, they failed to mention something rather critical: that any file over 75MB would be "killed" due to stress on the server. So my server itself was preventing the upload and in many cases, the smooth streaming experience. I literally spent days and hours trying to problem-solve this, implementing 3 players, changing video bitrates, etc., and have wasted a lot of time for nothing.

I've decided to upload my videos to Vimeo Pro and implement their player into my site and I couldn't be happier with the results. But they're not cheap! It's $220 (CDN) a year if you want to upload files larger than 5GB. On top of that, your workload is much more time consuming. Instead of just making your own mp4s or webM's, you have to export a high quality H.264 movie (for a feature length, this can take half a day), then upload that baby, and then wait for Vimeo to transcode it. If anything screws up along the way (like my first 26 hour upload), this can prove to be quite stressful. But when finished, it's easy as pie to implement on your site, you get an HD option, can customize colours and logo, and playback is buttery smooth. That's because they transcode to a much lower bitrate than most filmmakers would accept. You lose a bit of quality but if anyone complains that your video isn't working, which is probably unlikely, you can just blame Vimeo!

Plus, their Password Protection is great and now you're part of the bigger community. If that's your thing.

As for HTML5 players, if I had to choose one I think I'd go with Flowplayer.

Last edit 9 years ago

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rMBP 15", 2.6 Ghz, 16 GB RAM, OS X 10.11.6, with 27" Thunderbolt Cinema Display

www.cleetche.com


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