How to Insert an HTML5 Video

I was recently asked to add a film trailer to an existing website and looked around for tools that would provide a cross-browser solution. I found an actively supported open-source player at videojs.com and started to test it.

Looked good at first, but then usability issues cropped up. I wanted play/pause triggered with the space bar, no control bar at start, and at the end the movie should spool back to the beginning. I solved most of this except for the space bar, but what really bothered me with the videojs project is the way features were changed, dropped, and re-added by contributors without notice, keeping you hopping about between the rapidly incrementing versions to get a working feature set.

Isn’t there a simpler way? Turns out there is. Continue reading