Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller

What do you do when private equity buys your old company and fires the maintainers of the popular open source project you started over a decade ago? You reboot it, and bring along some new friends to do it.

Video.js is used by billions of people every month, on sites like Amazon.com, Linkedin, and Dropbox, and yet it wasn’t in great shape. A skeleton crew of maintainers were doing their best with a dated architecture, but it needed more. So Sam from Plyr, Rahim from Vidstack, and Wes and Christain from Media Chrome jumped in to help me rebuild it better, faster, and smaller.

It’s in beta now. Please give it a try and tell us what breaks.

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rcakebread 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I just happened to try v10 yesterday for HLS and it's looking great so far.

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michaelsalim an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Looking great. I'll give it a try later on once things stabilize a bit. In the meantime, does anyone know what's going on in this space? Seems to me like a lot is changing over the past year. Eg: react-player new version, taken over by Mux. And also I did realize Video.js is sponsored by Mux. And also seemingly different companies working together.

	▲	Heff 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		OP and Mux co-founder here so have all the context on this. A lot has changed. Mux stepped in to help maintain React Player a few years ago. It wasn't getting frequent updates and Mux has a vested interest in the whole OSS player ecosystem (even if we didn't built it) because Mux Video (hosting) is player agnostic, and we get support requests for all of them. @luwes from Mux did the work to get to the new version, while making it possible to use Media Chrome media elements with React Player and consolidating some development efforts. We're still a tiny player team so that was important. There are no immediate plans to deprecate React Player and I think it holds a special place in the ecosystem, but there will be overlap with video.js v10 and if there's specific features you care about or feel are missing, or if you think we're doing a bad job, please voice it here. It was a similar story with Vidstack and Plyr, with Mux first sponsoring the projects. That's how I met Rahim and Sam, and how we got talking about a shared vision for the future of players.

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grzes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

can anyone recommend me good, battle-tested "slider" solution for playing videos as well as displaying images from single gallery? ideally capable of handling huge galleries (hundreds of items) with lazy loading

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Heff 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Not a today answer, but this is something I'm excited to build within the new Presets concept of video.js v10, where we can build specific "video interfaces" beyond a standard player using the composable architecture.

https://videojs.org/docs/framework/react/concepts/presets

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bananadonkey 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I've used https://yet-another-react-lightbox.com/ in anger and it's great, very extensible too.

	▲	spankalee 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That only works in React though.

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nakodari 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Absolutely love what you and your friends have built. Great work! Will give it a spin.

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thedanbob an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very nice! I switched off video.js some time ago because it kept giving me trouble. Looking forward to trying this new version.

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sam_goody an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Very nice. Good Luck!

Did the private equity buy the domain videojs.org (did it take control of the project and you somehow regained control after selling) or was this domain (and the project) always under your control?