We are very excited to announce the release of Video.js 4.0, now available for download, on Github and hosted for free on our CDN. As background, Video.js is an open source HTML5 video player created by the team at Zencoder, which Brightcove acquired last summer.
Video.js is disrupting the market for open source video player technology and has seen tremendous adoption and market share in just a few years. The free Video.js player is used by tens of thousands of organizations, including Montblanc, Dolce & Gabbana, Diesel, Illy, Applebee’s, Mattel, Kellogg’s, Les Echos, US Navy, Aetna, Transamerica, Washington State University, and many others.
Version 4.0 received the most community collaboration of any previous version, which speaks to the growing strength of the JavaScript community, the growing popularity of HTML5 video, and an increase in Video.js usage. Over the last year, the number of sites using Video.js has more than doubled, and each month there are more than 200 million hits to the CDN-hosted version alone.
There are many exciting new features in Video.js 4.0, including:
- Improved performance through an 18% size reduction using Google Closure Compiler in advanced mode
- Greater stability through an automated cross-browser/device test suite using TravisCI, Bunyip, and Browserstack.
- New plugin interface and plugin listing for extending Video.js
- New default skin design that uses font icons for greater customization
- Responsive design and retina display support
- Improved accessibility through better ARIA support
- Moved to Apache 2.0 license
- 100% JavaScript development tool set including Grunt
You can read more about the features in version 4.0 on the Video.js blog. And stay tuned, as this will be an exciting year ahead for Video.js, with more improvements to performance, multi-platform stability and customizability through plugins and skins. Members of the community have already started work on plugins for some of the more requested features, like playlists, analytics, and advertising.
You can also follow @videojs on Twitter or sign up for the Video.js newsletter to stay up-to-date on new features and roadmap updates. And if you would like to get involved in the project, check out the contributing guide.