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Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, “a decent video player” feels like something that should be table-stakes commodity stuff, there are certainly a fair number of good open source video player components and toolkits with customizable skins and support for tons of playback formats and protocols. But no, this is actually something billion dollar companies struggle with.

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I'm surprised that there isn't a standardized open source web video player which all websites use so users have the same video player experience and features across the web. Usually commercial or "free" video players are bad like JW player or whatever freemium players there are.

There are open source HTML players tho but they are not as powerful and feature rich as YouTube player.

I remember watching IGN gaming videos on their website's player and the experience was horrible. Tbh idk what's the best open source video player out there right now.

Video.js does a pretty good job. Most of these places seem to choose to have a bad experience, by not understanding what they're doing and getting a terrible vendor solution. Often triggered by DRM panic.

Because the player is only the first step. Then you need all the other stuff like a CDN distribution to get it close enough to all your subscribers/able to handle all the subscribers pulling down video. I'd be shocked if the core player that just shows pixels on the screen is anyones' problem at this point.

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