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

#1

Post by Heff » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 6:03 PM UTC

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.

Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller
videojs.org

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

#2

Post by nakodari » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 10:23 PM UTC

Absolutely love what you and your friends have built. Great work! Will give it a spin.

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

#3

Post by sam_goody » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 10:40 PM UTC

Very nice. Good Luck!

Did the private equity buy the domain videojs.org (did it take control of the project and you somehow regained control after selling) or was this domain (and the project) always under your control?

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

#4

Post by thedanbob » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 10:55 PM UTC

Very nice! I switched off video.js some time ago because it kept giving me trouble. Looking forward to trying this new version.

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

#5

Post by michaelsalim » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 10:58 PM UTC

Looking great. I'll give it a try later on once things stabilize a bit. In the meantime, does anyone know what's going on in this space? Seems to me like a lot is changing over the past year. Eg: react-player new version, taken over by Mux. And also I did realize Video.js is sponsored by Mux. And also seemingly different companies working together.

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

#6

Post by grzes » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

can anyone recommend me good, battle-tested "slider" solution for playing videos as well as displaying images from single gallery? ideally capable of handling huge galleries (hundreds of items) with lazy loading

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

#7

Post by rcakebread » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

I just happened to try v10 yesterday for HLS and it's looking great so far.

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

#8

Post by bananadonkey » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

grzes wrote: post #6

can anyone recommend me good, battle-tested "slider" solution for playing videos as well as displaying images from single gallery? ideally capable of handling huge galleries (hundreds of items) with lazy loading

I've used https://yet-another-react-lightbox.com/ in anger and it's great, very extensible too.

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

#9

Post by spankalee » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 11:19 PM UTC

bananadonkey wrote: post #8

grzes wrote: post #6

can anyone recommend me good, battle-tested "slider" solution for playing videos as well as displaying images from single gallery? ideally capable of handling huge galleries (hundreds of items) with lazy loading

I've used https://yet-another-react-lightbox.com/ in anger and it's great, very extensible too.

That only works in React though.

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

#10

Post by Heff » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 11:25 PM UTC

grzes wrote: post #6

can anyone recommend me good, battle-tested "slider" solution for playing videos as well as displaying images from single gallery? ideally capable of handling huge galleries (hundreds of items) with lazy loading

Not a today answer, but this is something I'm excited to build within the new Presets concept of video.js v10, where we can build specific "video interfaces" beyond a standard player using the composable architecture.

https://videojs.org/docs/framework/react/concepts/presets