Video is almost a necessity in website design these days, and using a jQuery plugin to present videos is a great time-saver for both developers and designers. We are fortunate that a lot of developers like to share their work with us and offer these plugins at no charge, and some are thrown out to the development world as open-source plugins. Here we share with you 10 great video plugins that could enhance any website.
Video jQuery Plugins
FitVids
This jQuery plugin has been around a long time, and has proved to be popular. Developed by Chris Coyier and Paravel, it is a lightweight and easy-to-use plugin for fluid width video embeds.
jPlayer
The developers call this ‘The jQuery HTML5 Audio/Video Library’. Features include: totally customizable and skinnable using HTML and CSS, only 14kb, free and open source, free plugins available, extensive platform support, and more.
BigVideo
This is exactly what it says – a jQuery plugin for big background video and images. Their demo page uses parallax scrolling on a full size background video, and is a pure delight to see.
Tubular
With this jQuery plugin you can use YouTube videos for full screen background videos.
Popcorn
This video embedding jQuery plugin has been developed by Mozilla. In their overview they state: ‘Popcorn.js can be used with almost any media type you can imagine, from HTML5 audio and video, to YouTube and Vimeo, to SoundCloud, etc. Popcorn.js also has plugins to allow content from popular web sites and services to be integrated easily, for example, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google Maps, etc. ‘
Video
Video.js is an open source HTML5 and Flash video player. It supports HTML5 and Flash video, as well as YouTube and Vimeo (through plugins), and video playback on desktops and mobile devices.
Embed
Embed.js offers an amazing range of features by analysing a string and automatically embedding the supported emojis, media, maps, tweets, code and services. Features include: YouTube and Vimeo video embedding, HTML5 player supported media embedding, Twitter tweet embedding, soundcloud and spotify support, live streaming support, Google map location embed.
jQuery Videosequence
This plugin is for creating video and audio sequences with media source extensions. The developers realize that using this plugin without full knowledge of medai source extensions could cause a lot of stress, so the recommend reading a Wiki article on the WebM Project before starting with this plugin.
Acorn Media Player
This is a nice looking media player plugin and features include: easy customization and theming, fullscreen support, buffering indicator, loading indicator, free and open source.
jQuery Video Background Plugin
This plugin will place a resizable video in to the background of the page or designated element. Browsers that don’t support the HTML5 video element will get an image if a poster image was provided.
Conclusion
Embedded videos and video backgrounds are becoming more and more popular in website design, so these plugins are great time-savers for developers, and open up the choice for designers.
Do you use any jQuery video plugins that we didn’t include in this list? Please share your links and opinions with us in the comments section below.