Today we’d like to show you a pre-release demo of SublimeVideo. It’s an HTML5 video player that will allow you to easily embed videos in any page, blog or site using the latest modern web standards.
Browsers makers are still working on fully supporting the HTML5 video specification, so at the moment SublimeVideo is still in experimental state and only works on a limited number of browsers. But the long term goal is to make it work on all modern browsers.
SublimeVideo will be soon released for free (at least for non-commercial use).
Key Features
- Full-window mode
This will maximize the video to fit the browser’s window. It can be handy if you still want to access other applications while watching a maximized video in your browser.
Besides, browsers makers are still working on implementing true fullscreen for HTML5 videos; so full-window is currently the only way to maximize the video on Safari and Chrome. - Full-screen mode
Currently only supported in the latest WebKit Nightly Builds, you can activate this mode by ALT-clicking on the full-window button. - HTML5 video benefits
No browser plugin, no Flash dependencies!
You can also jump anywhere in the video without having to wait for it to buffer.
See more features on the SublimeVideo demo page.
There are 96 comments
Adam says:
January 26th, 2010 at 3:25 pmBeautiful work! Certainly adds a bit of class to the HTML5 Video effort.
Panagiotis Spiliotis says:
January 26th, 2010 at 3:35 pmLooking forward to your release.
at some point there was a problem with the display of the remaining and elapsed seconds, they stopped updating at 0:17 (Chrome on Mac). Fullscreen is still quite buggy…
Cheers
Zeno says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 5:40 pmChrome Mac is still quite buggy regarding html5 video decoding. Also, no antialiasing is currently provided when the video is upscaled or downscaled. We hope things will get better in future updates of Chrome.
Kev says:
January 26th, 2010 at 7:22 pmYes, beautiful work.
Moitah says:
January 26th, 2010 at 7:57 pmThis is… I just wet my pants.
This player should be the default one we get when we have a on Safari.
Matt Hoult says:
January 26th, 2010 at 8:07 pmReally beautiful work. Picked up the control movement bug, but overall it’s very impressive.
PoPoX says:
January 26th, 2010 at 8:52 pmBrilliant! How on earth is it possible? Internet browsers are turning into fully competent OS.. Google might be right with its Chrome OS!
Great job from you guys, well done.
Mathias Bynens says:
January 26th, 2010 at 9:24 pmLooks amazing. Can’t wait ’til more browsers are supported :)
Mark Dodwell says:
January 27th, 2010 at 2:59 amVery nice. The interaction feels so much more fluid and native that the current Flash players.
Adrian Kosmaczewski says:
January 27th, 2010 at 10:01 amGorgeous. Really, pick up that phone and tell Google to use it for Google Video and YouTube now. And then call Adobe to wake them up.
Rémy says:
January 30th, 2010 at 6:22 pmImpressive, clean & smooth, I love the movable controls!
Rémy says:
February 1st, 2010 at 12:28 pmFullscreen in Webkit is perfect! I love it!
Maybe the behavior could be changed when you are in full-window, and alt-click on “full-screen” icon. It’s currently downsizing to normal size (and you have to re-alt-click for fullscreen), it’d be better to go directly to full-screen (even when you are in full-window)…
Looking forward for your thoughts! ;-)
Ben Radler says:
January 31st, 2010 at 5:48 amGreat implementation, I’d love to see a player like this adopted as the standard for the element in HTML5.
Beautiful website by the way!
Fred K says:
January 31st, 2010 at 7:37 amJust curious: why did you choose to go with the “fullscreen” button for full window scaling, instead of the “change view scale” (a.k.a. ‘the letterbox’) button? It’s a little misleading, at least for those who use Quicktime-the-desktop-client, where the button you have here (full screen) toogles full **screen** and have been so since forever (albeit with different looks over the years).
Something that would be really nice (which I’ve asked from the Webkit guys as well) is to have a volume slider control available in standard view. But apart from that it looks and feels really nice.
Zeno says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 5:52 pmWe are actually using the same “fullscreen” button for both features: full-window (simple click) and full-screen (alt-click, currently only supported in WebKit Nightly build). But you are right, it can be a little misleading and we’ll try to find a better solution.
Bernard says:
February 1st, 2010 at 9:01 amThis is really great. Keep up the bright work. This isso bright and clean, love it.
Keefe says:
February 1st, 2010 at 9:46 amLooks great, only missing controls for volume
Steve (Not that Steve) says:
February 1st, 2010 at 1:35 pmPlease sell it to Apple. This would be my favorite player! I love the responsivity and superb style!
Bram says:
February 1st, 2010 at 4:02 pmAmazing work, got rid of flash the moment I saw your player :) Very exciting.
eric_c says:
February 1st, 2010 at 10:48 pmno opera support? :o/
Zeno says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 5:20 pmWe’ll definitely add Opera support when they release v10.5 (currently in pre-alpha state) and their new HTML5 video implementation.
Cespur says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:03 amI’m really looking forward till the moment all Flash is banned from the internet. I’ve been doing that for years now, and SublimeVideo just taken a huge leap in that timeline. Thank you so much for this amazing peach of code & design!
Ajit says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 1:09 amBrilliant. Seriously. I’m going to use this!!
BTW, your entire is so well designed.
Carlo says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 1:48 amNice work!
Perfect timing too!!!
Bill Perry says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 1:52 amSweet, thanks for posting an example for everyone to see. Looking forward to when you release the code for others to use. Keep up the great work.
Gary says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 2:16 amThis is an incredible video and showcase of HTML5. I cannot believe how fast it loads!
We mentioned this video to our iPhone community here:
http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/iphone-news/why-the-iphone-does-not-need-flash-html5/
Jagath Narayan says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 2:50 amLooks amazing. Agree with @Adrian – it’ll be awesome to watch Youtube HD on this. Also love the demo video that you have chosen.
Declination says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 3:33 amJust wanted to say this is the most visually impressive in-browser video player I’ve seen, bar none.
Rick says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 4:19 amImpressive. Some places for improvement:
- Looks like some of the control images aren’t loaded right away: on the demo I saw the timeline before its background appeared. Preloading these would be good (then again, maybe you are already and your site’s just overloaded right now).
- Nothing happens when clicking on the video itself after it starts playing. (Double-clicking, in Safari 4.0.4 at least, highlights the first text after the video.) The old QuickTime conventions would be good to follow here: double-click anywhere in the movie to start/stop after playback first begins.
- A newer QuickTime convention that’s also good to follow: single-click outside of the floating controller hides it instantly so you don’t have to wait for it to fade out.
- When letterboxing content in full-window/fullscreen mode, there’s no reason the controller needs to float over the content if there’s room below.
Awesome stuff, looking forward to the release!
kroon78 says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:06 amCan’t wait for the release! Any chance this will work with Linux?
Zeno says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 5:12 pmOf course, once we add Firefox support, you’ll be able to use SublimeVideo to play Ogg/Theora videos.
oriste says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:04 amAb-so-effing-lutely gorgeous!
Jonas says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:43 pmThis is the future. And the future looks good. Awesome work.
WebMotiva says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 2:53 pmPoor Firefox.
Zeno says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 5:11 pmDon’t worry, we are seriously working on adding Firefox support…
Jason says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 4:08 pmWhy do you use the XHTML 1.0 Doctype. It is HTML5 video :)
David Chin says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 4:28 pmJust excellent! CPU usage was less than 20% on my 2.93 GHz iMac 24″ (early 2009) when played in full window mode.
Sylvain says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 4:44 pma great player, when do you think we can play with it ?
joesepi says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 7:26 pmWhat codec are you using. The codec has been a hot topic for heated debates as of lately. Hopefully, it is the free Theora and not the licensed h264.
Chris says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 8:54 pmI would hope they go with Theora too, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with the current demo: it plays mp4 files. Also, the fact that the only two browsers this works with right now are Chrome and Safari which are the only browsers to support H.264.
Zeno says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 10:34 pmCorrect, we are currently using MP4/H.264 in the demo page, but SublimeVideo will definitely support Ogg/Theora too. The reason we don’t support Firefox yet has nothing to do with video codecs (it’s because of its HTML5 JavaScript API which requires a different implementation compared to WebKit-enabled browsers)
David Novakovic says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:32 pmHey – i’d love to see html5 video playing inline in mobile safari. Opening up a big quicktime window isn’t great for websites that want to complement the video with other updates.
As much as I’ve tried I can’t get the video element to stream/play inline in a html5 doc. :(
Zeno says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:53 pmDavid, we’d love that too, really… but it is simply, currently, not possible (MobileSafari limitation).
Fabien says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:48 pmReally nice player, great work.
Just a remark (you surely already have noticed it), when the timer goes to a minute, it displays 00:60 instead of 01:00….
Regards
Zeno says:
February 4th, 2010 at 8:49 amThanks Fabien, it should now be fixed.
Manu says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:34 amBravo Zeno!
Jason says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:54 amFirst: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Finally. Second: I know this isn’t the point of all this, but what music is over the top of Watson’s video? I can’t remember the composer and it’s not the same as what’s on the video on Watson’s page. Thanks and great work!
Zeno says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:24 pmThe music is called “Aquarium”, it’s a movement from “Carnival of the Animals”.
The composer is Camille Saint-Saens.
Michiel Buddingh' says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 10:15 amHave you tested this on older computers? The video plays at about 5 seconds per frame for me (Linux, Chrome 4.0.249.30), even though my computer has no trouble with flash video at far larger resolutions.
hecooo says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:26 pmIt is so nice!I love it !
Samuel Beek says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:05 pmThis is very nice! It worked great in Safari. I love the fact that it doesn’t use flash.
Dss says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:31 pmHmm. I assume you had reasons to support 2 of the least used browsers first.. Wonder why no FF. Firefox supports HTML5 on other demos just fine. http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo
Lyle Turner says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:24 pmBrilliant video solution. But why is your webpage impossible to read? All text content is set to such a dark gray as to be nearly invisible.
In quiring minds want to know.
Octave says:
February 12th, 2010 at 12:07 pmWe just updated the main font, we hope it fixes the readability issue on your screen. The font rendering depends on your AppleFontSmoothing setting, if you are on a Mac.
Matt says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:54 pmBeautiful job. It worked flawlessly on my iPhone and well enough for a beta on the Mac w/ Safari. I can’t wait for it to be released. I guarantee I’ll be using it personally on my website and commercially on my work projects. Keep up the great work.
Amanda im Netz says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 7:27 pmSo beautiful! And so much better than Flash! I really love it!
What is the music you used in the video?
Zeno says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:25 pmIt’s a movement from “Carnival of the Animals” called “Aquarium”. The composer is Camille Saint-Saens.
Grant Symon says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 10:23 pmStunning piece of work. Well done … and phenomenal for a beta.
Question :
How could this be implemented to replace Flash in still image websites, for example those produced by the likes of BananAlbum? ( E.g. my own : http://www.grantsymon.com)
Chris says:
February 4th, 2010 at 12:29 amHey Zeno, am I right in assuming that we’ll still need to provide the video in multiple formats for this to work cross browser? There’s probably not much you can do to get around the built-in codecs, but I hope there will be an easy way for it to serve the right format depending on the browser (well, not like we can’t do that already with a bit of programming, but the easier the better).
rdela says:
February 4th, 2010 at 5:13 amHTML5 STARS!!!!!
*****
Fabio says:
February 4th, 2010 at 9:56 pmNo Firefox (Theora codec) support = Crap
you are talking about openess but h.264 isn’t open, it’s closed source and licenced software
please support really open and free codecs like Theora, Mozilla does, Opera does, why not you?
Zeno says:
February 4th, 2010 at 11:33 pmHey Fabio, calm down ;-)
Firefox support is coming. Soon. Just stay tuned.
Benn says:
February 5th, 2010 at 1:19 amFabio, they aren’t talking about openness, there is no mention of it on either page.
What they do mention over and over again is that this isn’t released code yet and that Firefox support is coming soon (but they have to recode all the Javascript for it first).
Not reading = Crap.
Els says:
February 5th, 2010 at 2:39 amSublimeVideo rocks. Please keep us up to date!
David says:
February 5th, 2010 at 11:58 amGreat work! Can’t wait to see the final version!
WFT says:
February 6th, 2010 at 1:53 amI love this! One of my favorite things that you guys have lined up is the support for the people still using ie. Unfortunately a lot of the web is still using it and one of the major things limiting web developers is the ability to support Internet explorer.
OSC says:
February 6th, 2010 at 4:21 amJust an amazing video player.
Fight With Dogma says:
February 7th, 2010 at 6:53 amIs your stuff opensource? Because that’s awesome. HTML5 brought us canvas, audio and video, and we all can say byebye flash.
Xor says:
February 7th, 2010 at 4:25 pmDoesn’t work on Iron.
That’s the reason HTML 5 video won’t replace Flash any time soon…
Zeno says:
February 11th, 2010 at 5:55 pmSRWare Iron, despite being based on Chromium, doesn’t currently support H.264 videos (it only supports Ogg Theora, like Firefox).
But today we’ve added Firefox & Ogg Theora support to SublimeVideo, so it should now work on Iron too… Let me know if it doesn’t.
David Ingledow says:
February 8th, 2010 at 6:29 pmCan’t wait to start embedding videos in my blog with this! The only thing is, what do we do about compatibility with older browsers? I think that users of old browsers should be forced to update, otherwise they can’t use the internet!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!
PlayStation won’t let you use any online service until you update the system – they should do that with browsers!
itReptil says:
February 8th, 2010 at 10:58 pmgreat job
bfl says:
February 12th, 2010 at 8:30 amThis is wonderful!
–bfl
Presse Mitteilung says:
February 15th, 2010 at 9:15 pmCool player, works great in Chrome. I hope you will release some beta soon.
Remeber: Release early, release often and the community will help you to find the remaining bugs.
Chris Valenti says:
February 18th, 2010 at 5:23 amThis is just what many of us have waited for. do you have any timeline for the release date.
Duncan Mackenzie says:
February 20th, 2010 at 2:19 amBeautiful player, very interested in using in the future…
small comment, I found the lack of the standard ‘click’ pointer over the button and slider thumb disturbing at first. It is easy to add, it seems, via cursor:pointer; to .play_pause_button in the css … not a criticism, just something that was nagging at me when I looked at it and I thought I’d mention it.
indieCore says:
February 28th, 2010 at 7:38 amWill we be able to use playlist files on this? I use flash for my WebTV on my radio stations site. If this could read from a playlist randomly i will be ready to add this on day 1!
Jutix says:
March 1st, 2010 at 3:27 pmAmazing !
Robert says:
March 2nd, 2010 at 11:08 pmFantastic! Works like a dream on Chrome/Linux/Intel Atom 330. Your player is better quality than any other Flash video playback on this platform.
Would it be possible to add keyboard shortcuts to control all the facilities of the player? I see spacebar for pause/play but what about shortcuts for transitioning in to and out of fullscreen?. Keyboard shortcuts are useful so that you can configure a remote control to drive the player. Imagine sitting on your sofa watching an HTML5 video play through on your TV…
Keep up the excellent work!
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