Open Source Video Players for Web

Longtime back a requirement came up, where I had to integrate video playback functionality in a webpage. The requirements specifically mentioned that it should be platform agnostic. Initially I thought of using Silverlight to get this done; but the downside of using Silverlight was that, it wasn't supporting Linux platform which breaks platform agnostic requirement. 

After some search I ended up with a handful of options which included Flash player and HTML5 Video Playback as well. Fortunately the video formats which I had to handle were all MPEG-4, which was supported by most popular web video players including Silverlight, Flash and HTML5. Finally I decided to go for an hybrid solution which works based on the following logic. 

If the browser supports HTML5 then the "Video" tag was used to playback the video, If not use Adobe Flash player, else use the Silverlight. If the browser didn't support any of those, the user is alerted to upgrade to a latest browser version or to install any of the supported players.

Here are some of the video players I came to stumble upon while working on this requirement.

Open Video Player - A fully open source video player and the best player I had ever seen and the best part is that its freeware. The player comes with a  pretty good number of options for you to choose from, like HTML 5 Video, Silverlight, Flash and iOS (Apple platform).

Flow Player - An Open source video player based on Adobe Flash. A free version is available under the GPL license. The free version even allows commercial use at the time of writing. The only downside is that, it displays their branding logo at the beginning of video playback, which isn't that obstructive to the viewer. If you are concerned about the branding logo at start of every clip, then there's a commercial version as well which is free from all these. Moreover the commercial version allows you to put your own branding logo in there.

JW Player - An open Source video player based on Adobe Flash. Display's branding text on to the left bottom side at the beginning of the video, after a while it disappears. The Pro version has even lot many options but will cost you some bucks. The restricting factor is the licensing terms on using the player on commercial sites.