Best (Free) HTML5 Video Players

HTML5 video may have been the new standard way to show video on the web without plugins, simply by embedding to web browsers. As HTML5 being increasingly popular and compatible with various devices, HTML5 video player enables your blog or website page launching with videos. Let’s see a collection of some best free ones available.

1. Flowplayer
It is an Open Source video player for your website. There are at least 3 skins for your options to beautify and diversify your websites. You can embed it to your website without an IFRAME. HTML5 comes first while Flash second. Very well documented, clean look and easy to implement. Great playlist feature and lots of active development are all displayed in this HTML5 video player.

2. JW Player
With HTML5 and Flash Dual Mode JW Player, you’d never worry about your video be the wrong formats. Beautiful skins, live and on-demand adaptive streaming support, single-click sharing to Facebook and Twitter, all these features forms this nice HTML5 video player.

3. MediaElement.js
There are also 3 different skins for your choice. It can be perfectly used as Plugins for Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, jQuery, and BlogEngine.NET, ruby gem, plone. It allows HTML5 audio and video players in pure HTML and CSS.

4. Projekktor
It is a free, open source (GPL) HTML5 based video player written in Javascript. It solves cross browser and compatibility issues, adds eye candy and provides extremely powerful nonstandard features. It supports full screen, playlists, Flash fallback and pre/post roll ads to generate revenue from your videos.

5. Daily Motion HTML5 Video Player
The HTML5 video player from world’s second largest video sharing website, HTML5 makes all sorts nifty effects and gadgets possible. Firefox, Chrome, IE 9, Opera, Safari, all modern browsers are supported by it.

6. YouTube HTML5 Video Player
From world’s largest video sharing website, this is an opt-in trial of HTML5 video on YouTube. If you are using a supported browser, you can choose to use the HTML5 player instead of the Flash player for most videos. It supports various browsers.

7. Viemo HTML5 Video Player
Well, this HTML3 video player comes from another video sharing website. It comes as a beta test version actually. To enable the HTML5 player, click the "Switch to HTML5 player" link below any video.

8. OSM Player
Open Standard Media Player is an all-in-one media player for the web display video of any type of web media, including HTML5, Flash and third party media solutions of YouTube and Vimeo. There is playlist for your player and for YouTube.

9. FlareVideo HTML5 Player
It is completely open source and free for commercial use. This HTML5 video player supports HTML5 video with Flash fallback. It is featured of easy CSS/HTML/JS customization and theming; full screen support. There are 3 optional themes for your reference.

HTML5 Player: Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia!

As the world’s largest online encyclopedia, free Wikipedia has been working hard to bring registered users new features of videos uploading. This could almost be true now, due the cooperation of Wikipedia, Google and Kaltura. Wikipedia video has taken years to realize this  with  the launch of TimeMediaHandler.

In 2010, a campaign called “Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia” launched by the Open Video Alliance aiming to encourage users uploading relevant educational video content to Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier in 2008, Wikipedia began the partnership with open source video platform provider Kaltura for getting Wikipedia video-supportive. Actually, Wikipedia Theora Player has been put in to application since 2007; however, till now only about 15500 videos shown on Wikipedia, it still remains largely text-based.

Best Tips to Smooth YouTube Playback without Lengthy Buffering

As the world’s most popular video sharing website as well as U.S. teens’top choice for listening music, the huge amount of video content on YouTube leads the global trend at an explosive speed while stream buffering makes videos viewing unsuitable for its spread pace. There are some best tips to smooth YouTube playback without too much boring waiting.

Premise: your computer should be in a normal condition and well-connected to the network, which means you can watch YouTube videos but maybe with slow loading.

1. YouTube “Feather” beta: it enables YouTube faster speed for video viewing, but just for some videos currently as it is still in progress. As it is intended to serve YouTube video watch pages with the lowest latency possible, it causes severe loss in the features available: expanding share boxes, collapsible comments, and a long list of related videos on the side of the page. And the simplified layout would be: first few comments as fixed text on the page; only offers thumbs up/down, flag buttons; “related videos” shows in 5 items; etc. By reducing the bytes downloaded by the browser, loading time shortens. LOL, the ads are still on.

2. YouTube HTML5 Video Player: most videos’ playback would be realized by HTML5 player instead of flash player if you are using a supported browser (Firefox4, Google Chrome, Opera 10.6+, Safari, IE 6,7,8,9).

 

3. Change your DNS servers.

• Go Windows Start button, and run Control Panel.
• Click on Network and Sharing Center.
• Select Manage network connections.
• Double click on active internet connection, probably named as Local Area Connection.
• Click Properties.
• Now double click Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4), located in middle form.
• Select Use the following DNS server addressed, and change them to:

Preferred DNS Server: 208.67.222.222
Alternate DNS Server: 208.67.222.220

Updated on 10.06.2010: If you are located in Europe, I would recommend you to use Google’s public DNS servers:

Preferred DNS Server: 8.8.8.8
Alternate DNS Server: 8.8.4.4

• Click OK to confirm changes to Open DNS servers.

4. Additionally, to those who only listen to music and care less about the MV video, you can try Fav Tube maybe. Since no video is loading, speed will be faster. Of course, there are lots of other tools.

5. Little tricks: maybe you can just watch to watch the later part of the video, just drag the play bar to the point you want to start, it will start buffering from there. Or if it still won’t work after all these are done, you may just download the YouTube video for enjoyment. Or check out your internet condition!

Without the boresome waiting and waiting, you can now smooth your YouTube videos playback. Have a try! May there be some other better ones? Leave a comment to let me know. (The 4th method is from: fixexe, thanks)

Samsung’s Updates: Flash Player still Exists

Days later after Adobe’s announcement of withdrawing from the battle of mobile devices browser player with HTML5, no Flash Player download available from Google’s app store Play could be found these days.

 Along with this decision, there is supposed to be no certified version of Flash Player for Android 4.1. For older versions of Google OS, limited use of Flash Player is still I use. However, users have no choice but removing the player after updating to Android 4.1.

That’ to say if your mobile runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, then it won’t go well with Flash Player any more. Even for updated users, Adobe suggested you uninstalling Flash as the uncertified version could exhibit unpredictable behavior.

Then when it comes to Samsung Galaxy S3, many users are worrying about losing Flash Player upon its updating to Jelly Bean 4.1.1. Will that take place in next month (September)? The good news is that: Samsung and Adobe have officially stated that all users of Galaxy S3 I9300 would keep their Flash Player, when upgrade from Android 4.0 ICS to Jelly Bean.

Actually, S3 users should know that Flash websites do work smoothly largely because of Samsung S3. Well, the updates would be set on the fourth quarter of 2012 and Galaxy S3, S2, Note, Note 2 are all expected to equipped with JB.Samsung confirmed during its IFA 2012 keynote today that a Jelly Bean update is coming to both the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 10.1 "very soon." It’s good to know that Adobe Flash Player still exists in mobile and of Android after August 15th.