jPlayer

HTML5 Audio & Video for jQuery

a project by happyworm

About jPlayer

Developed by Happyworm, jPlayer is Free, Open Source and licensed under the MIT license.

One of Mark Boas's many ideas, it has been made real by Mark Panaghiston.

Silvia Benvenuti helped with the HTML, CSS and all the pretty graphics.

Happyworm is a small web agency that focuses on innovation.

jPlayer Tweets

jPlayer Team Tweets

jPlayer History

jPlayer was first released as a beta in May 2009 after 6 months of development. By August 2009, jPlayer had evolved from its original 'hidden Flash' roots to create one of the first, if not the first, HTML5 audio players with a flash fallback.

We let the beta simmer a while. jPlayer worked as a plugin, but it was not particularly well written, with many methods dangling on the jQuery object. We incorporated key parts of the jQuery UI core into jPlayer to solve this. Along with a bunch of other tweaks here and there, we released the first official version in February 2010.

We continued to develop jPlayer, fixing the bugs along the way. We reviewed the accessibility of the HTML used in our demos, since we noticed that a large number of users were copying them directly and adding their own tracks. We then proposed a standard way of structuring the HTML with the hope that people would create skins and sumbit them, but that never really kicked off. The final version of jPlayer the jQuery audio player plugin was released in July 2010 and appears to have served many people very well since then.

We set ourselves a new goal. We wanted to enable video in jPlayer. Ironically, the HTML5 solution took about 10 minutes to get the basics working. The Flash fallback was a different matter. The Flash for jPlayer was written in Actionscript 2, but all the groovy video stuff is in Actionscript 3. We dumped the old Flash in the bin and started again. We got the basics working in Flash pretty quickly, and was able to prove that this would work. Then all hell broke loose when it was decided that jPlayer 2, would be completely event driven. After all, the HTML media elements create events, why not make jPlayer use the identical scheme as laid down by the HTML5 Media spec. And while we are at it, why not make everything work in a better way too. Most of the old JavaScript went in the bin at this point.

So here we are in December 2010, after a complete code rewrite, releasing jPlayer 2 the jQuery media player plugin. We think you'll like like.