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I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller

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What do you do when private equity buys your old company and fires the maintainers of the popular open source project you started over a decade ago? You reboot it, and bring along some new friends to do it.Video.js is used by billions of people every month, on sites like Amazon.com, Linkedin, and Dropbox, and yet it wasn’t in great shape. A skeleton crew of maintainers were doing their best with a dated architecture, but it needed more. So Sam from Plyr, Rahim from Vidstack, and Wes and Christain from Media Chrome jumped in to help me rebuild it better, faster, and smaller.It’s in beta now. Please give it a try and tell us what breaks.

HN · launched Mar 24, 2026 · 648 upvotes (top 1%) · 0 views

Niche: video players and display software · 91 launches, 7 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Media & entertainment
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 91 launches in video players and display software →

Could you build this?

No Rewriting Video.js requires deep, specialized browser multimedia expertise, cross-browser quirks handling, MSE/EME (Media Source Extensions / Encrypted Media Extensions), adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/DASH), and performance optimization across thousands of devices.

What it would actually take: This project requires seasoned video engineering specialists proficient in HTML5 video APIs, MSE, EME, and WebCodecs, alongside custom parsers for MP4/TS containers and HLS/DASH manifests. The extreme complexity lies in maintaining seamless cross-platform playback across edge cases, legacy smart TVs, iOS Safari constraints, DRM systems, and plugin architectures while minimizing bundle size to tens of kilobytes.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Plyr, HLS.js, Native HTML5 video element, youtube-video-element

Concerns raised: Bundle size and page load time impact, Limited access to YouTube player settings and closed captions, Frame accuracy and currentTime randomization issues, Browser-specific API limitations (audio streams, Web Codecs, Casting), Cross-browser feature parity challenges

Feature requests: Improved YouTube player settings and CC accessibility, Audio stream selection for multi-track videos, Frame-accurate video seeking, Waveform generation from video sources, React Native support for non-browser platforms

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 236 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #1 of 237 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 142 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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