Video is everywhere these days and for good reason. Even a short video clip contains a lot more information than a still image. But playing back videos in a way that works across browsers and devices has been tricky. Just using the HTML5 video tag means you have no control over the controls on the video and event handling is a complete cross-browser mess. Both jwplayer and video.js don’t behave like standard HTML elements and are therefore hard to use in modern responsive layouts.

If you have been looking for an alternative, the wait is over: today Ziggeo is open sourcing their video player. Including it in a page is as simple as adding a player tag. The player behaves like any other HTML tag and supports Flash fallback for older browsers and video formats. And it is highly customizable and every level from using CSS to style the controls all the way to subclassing the event loop (for example to add a pre-roll video ad).

The Ziggeo video player is part of a new open source Javascript framework called BetaJS. Why YAJSF? (Yet Another Javascript Framework) you may ask. As it turns out the existing frameworks have a fundamental problem for anyone wanting to write a web component (such as a video player) that can readily be included in a third party site: the frameworks don’t play nicely with each other. With BetaJS on the other hand you can write components that will do just fine with React or Angular or anything else used on the same page. That’s far from the only cool thing about BetaJS but is essential for the awesome extensibility of the video player.

Oliver who created BetaJS is giving a talk about the player and the framework today at the Fluent Conference in SF today. If you happen to be there you should definitely hear him talk. In any case I recommend that you go and try out the player and BetaJS.