• Introduction
• Introduction
• Concepts
• Overview of Concepts and Terms
• Sef-Hosting or Video Service
• A Hybrid Approach to Online Video
• Advances in Online Video Players
• Aggregation of Video
• Useful Online Services
• Miro Community
• Creating Subtitles Online with Amara
• Hands On: WordPress
• Inbuilt Video Features in WordPress
• An Intro to Choosing WordPress Plugins
• Advanced Responsive Video Embedder
• Video Aggregation in Wordpress
• Hand On: Drupal
• Basic Video Embedding Drupal
• Uploading Video Files in Drupal
• Choosing an HTML5 Video Player
• Hybrid Approaches for Video in Drupal
• Video Aggregation in Drupal
• Hand On: Plumi
• Intro to Plumi
• Plumi Video Features
• Installing and Configuring Plumi

Choosing an HTML5 Video Player

This section on choosing an HTML5 player is written from the context of the Drupal CMS. However, the same approach could be used for many other systems.

HTML5 is a specification and set of technologies that allow us take advantage of the latest things you can do inside of web pages. The HTML5 specification added a <VIDEO> tag which was a step forward in delivering video. Websites are moving away from 'Flash' players which use proprietary and sometimes costly technology towards more open source solutions.

This is good news for us as there are many HTML5 Video players that we can freely modify and without cost on our websites.

Choosing Player Functionality

While some of will celebrate the diversity of HTML5 Video players available to us, others may find the range of choice confusing. Here is a list of just some of the most popular players.

• Kaltura Video Player
• Projekktor Video Player
• Video JS Player
• JW Video Player
• JQuery Video Video Player
• Mediaelement.js Video Player
• SublimeVideo Video Player
• JPlayer Video Player
• Flowplayer

Luckily, there are a few websites that can help us to make this choice. The following process is based on the approach of these websites.

• http://html5video.org
• http://praegnanz.de/html5video/

Firstly, we need to decide on what functions we want our player to be able to do. The sites list some of the following features which you may or not need for your website.

• Flash fallback: Can you use a flash video player or plugin if the user's browser doesn't support your video?
• Unified Look/API: is the look and functionality the same for HTML5 and the flash fallback option?
• iOS Support: Will the videos play on iOS devices like iPads and iPhones?      
• True Fullscreen: Is there an option to scale the player up to full screen?
• Subtitles: Can you display subtitles over videos?     
• Playlists: Can you input a list of videos and display the queued videos?      
• CMS Plugin: are there plugins to make it easily usable for CMSs like WordPress and Drupal?     
• Skinnable: Is it possible to add 'skins' to change the look of the player?   

There are some handy tables on the websites mentioned.

This chart is from HTML5Video.org.

The following chart is from praegnanz.de/html5video/.

Our top 5 Video Player Modules for Drupal

Some players have associated Drupal modules which help us to integrate them into our site.

While ultimately you will need to do your own research, here are our top 5 modules to help  integrate Video players into Drupal to get you started.

• MediaElement
  
• JWplayer
  
• Projekktor
• Flowplayer
• VideoJs