10 HTML5 Video Players as Alternatives to Flash Player

Flash has always been the standard for displaying video online, yet with the arrival of HTML5 web developers have got more excellent possibilities to easily streamline video content.

HTML5 new specifications for a video is for sure one of the most talked aspects in the range of many new notable HTML5 features developed for more dynamic web applications and interfaces. Though support for HTML5 is still evolving, a video element has clear benefits for the users who can now get browser-native video players without any third-party plugins at all.

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In the current blog entry we've covered some of the best HTML5 media player implementations to help you get the most out of HTML5 video tag and embed video content into your web pages. This round-up is done specifically for you to decide which HTML5 video player is better for your website design project, so check out a few of the solutions that we particularly like. We invite you to rate the content, quality, and genre of these great video players and opt for the choices according to your needs.

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JW Player

What about skinable open source JW Player, this solution is all about Flash and HTML5 working together as part of a single video player. The player automatically falls back to the Flash or HTML5 mode when needed. This solution supports the major CDNs, YouTube, Adobe's Flash Media Server, HTTP streaming, major advertising networks, analytics providers, and more. JW Player as well has a range of add-ons to extend the players functionality. By choosing the JW Embedder, it will also provide hosting solutions and mobile support for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.

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SublimeVideo

Sublime Video is an HTML5 video player that allows you to easily embed video on web page using HTML5 with Flash Fallback. What you’ll need is just to add a single-line-of-code to run this video player. Note that this solution supports a limited number of browsers since it’s still in experimental state. Sublime Video solution is not based on any JS library and aims to provide a high quality user experience thanks to its consistent implementation of both HTML5 and Flash user interfaces. Besides, SublimeVideo supports iPhones, iPads, Android smartphones, as well as other mobile platforms. Note that it’s a player only, so you’ll have to have your own video hosting.

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VideoJS

VideoJS is a free, open source, skinnable, and lightweight HTML5 Video Player with three core parts, including an embed code (Video for Everybody), a JavaScript library (video.js), and a pure HTML/CSS skin (video-js.css). It allows you to embed video using HTML5 with forced fallback to Flash. Based on Video for Everybody, it adds custom video controls made of HTML that you can style anyway you please with a bit of CSS. VideoJS is a download rather than a hosted player; with browser bug fixes it has a consistent look between all major browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, IE9, and this apart is compatible with many handheld devices – iPhone, iPad, Android.

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Projekktor

Projekktor is a free, open source (GPL) HTML5 based video player written in JavaScript and containing Flash fallback. To install Projekktor, you’ll only need to add two line of JavaScript to your web page (and one more CSS for styling), besides you’ll be able to add and remove Projekktor whenever you want and without the need to alter your HTML at any time. Being controlled by custom scripts using its JavaScript API, Projekktor supports iPad, iPod, iPhone, IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, googleTV. It can optionally mount itself onto HTML5 <audio> and <video> tags, and, even more, has multimedia playlists which is a central part of this project.

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FlareVideo

Another completely open source and free for commercial use solution is FlareVideo which is a jQuery powered HTML5 video player. This fully customizable player supports fullscreen mode, has a fallback mechanism into a Flash driven player, an easy CSS/HTML/JS customization and theming. As for the browser support it is compatible with Safari, Firefox and IE7.

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MediaElement.js

MediaElement.js is a complete HTML5 audio and video player in pure HTML and CSS. Based on Video for Everybody it uses a custom Flash or Silverlight player that mimics the native HTML5 API for older browsers. MediaElement.js builds a fully skinnable player with features like support for the HTML5 track element, fullscreen video, and even ambilight. Additionally, it includes support for sub-titling and has plugins for WordPress, Drupal, jQuery, and BlogEngine.NET. With MediaElement.js, video controls are doing using HTML / CSS for cross-browser consistency.

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Kaltura

Kaltura is an easy to skin, extend and integrate HTML5 video player that works in all major browsers by using a unique fallback mechanism and playback engine (Native HTML5, Flash, VLC or Java Cortado) for your settings and video format. Unlike other HTML5 video players, it has developed a full library for videos so that with it videos can be watched even in IE. Kaltura’s player maintains a unified look and feel across formats and browsers, plus its platform additionally provides automatic transcoding into all supported formats (OGG, H.264, MOV, FLV etc.).

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LeanBack

LeanBack Player is an HTML5 Video Player an open source HTML5 video player that doesn't rely on any JavaScript frameworks. It has support for subtitles using HTML5 track element and language-selection by label attribute of track. The player has built-in fullscreen mode, volume controls and can handle multiple videos in a single page. Being skinnable through using CSS, LeanBack works in all popular browsers and falls back to Flash if HTML5 video is not supported.

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Video for Everybody

Video for Everybody is simply a chunk of HTML (no JavaScript) embed code for HTML5, that includes a fallback to a Flash video player, as well as video download links for devices that can’t do Flash or HTML5 video. It therefore works in RSS readers (no JavaScript), on the iPhone, iPad and on many browsers and platforms. This fully-featured solution is for those who want something really simple and are unfamiliar with HTML. Video for Everybody does not use JavaScript, and because of this, it does not work on Android versions prior to 2.3.

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Deciding which video player is right for you can be complicated. In this case you can use a nice comparison chart of various HTML5 video player solutions. This chart covers some key features to show you which video player has the options needed for your project, and additionally offers links to demos to see each video player in action. If you've tested on a browser or device any of the above-listed players or maybe some other ones not mentioned in this list, please let us know your impressions and give us a short feedback in the comments.

Read also: How To Create a Video Website