About a year or so ago a company called Jillion began developing one of the web’s first HTML5 video players. They called it the Sublime video player. Today they’ve got plenty of competition, but they are still the first at something. They are the first to officially make their HTML5 video player a commercial, software-as-a-service solution. And here’s how it works.
The Sublime video player obviously plays video on your web site. But it uses HTML5 to do it. And for non-HTML5 compatible browsers, it falls back to Flash. However, because it’s a hosted solution, you never need to worry about updates, upgrades and so on…they happen automatically. Which is a big plus with the rapidly moving pace of web video.
To use the Sublime video player, you follow these steps:
1. Sign-up for the Sublime video player and select a payment plan (the cost ranges from $10 to $100 a month)
2. Place one line of Javascript code in the header tag of your web site. This is pure Javascript, so it won’t conflict with other scripts you may have installed.
3. Use HTML5 video embed code in your site, wherever you want videos to appear (full documentation is on Sublimes site…you will need to encode your videos in the formats you want and host them yourself).
The end result is a video like you see below:
While a hosted video player like Sublime may not be for everyone, it does make the process of keeping a video player up to date, automatic. And the things you can do with the player are pretty slick. Of course there are plenty of other HTML5 video players you can check out too, like VideoJS from Zencoder…which is free and open source (but you’ve got to do all/any updates to the player yourself).
To check out what Sublime has to offer, click here.
The pricing is too high. I duplicated the exact look and functionality with fancyzoom lightbox and JW Player.