Simple question: why is the <video> HTML tag not good enough?

[binarykitchen]

Browsers and W3C have already invested a lot in the <video> HTML tag. It works very well.
Also, it comes with plenty of attributes to customise.

Skins can be customised with CSS, for example.

So, why the need for videojs, if I may ask here?

[heff]

Hey, good question. The video tag is great! It's come a very long way since Video.js was created (2010). If it's working for you and your use case, then no need to make things any more complicated.

The first place Video.js helps is providing a consistent UI between browsers. Here's a screen shot of the video tag UIs for Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

You may be able to style the default UIs with pseudo elements, but it's ill-advised because all the control sets are different and the browsers change them over time.

Video.js also provides a common API and UI for other embeds like Youtube and Vimeo.

From there, there are a lot of features the video element doesn't support, but I don't get the impression you're concerned with those. If you needed any of those, it'd be pretty obvious. If you're thinking about a video as basically an image with a play button, the video tag is pretty great. 👍

[binarykitchen]

Thanks for your honesty @heff ✌️

First, some context ...

Why am I questioning this?
I'm the inventor of https://videomail.io where Deaf people can email in Sign Language. Or hearing people can speak and email that, along with automated AI captioning through Whisper like your other mux library does. This for maximum accessibility.

Some history:

Yeah, I remember, Video.js from 2010. I think it gave Macromedia's Dreamweaver the final blow, lol

Videomail was set up in 2013 and at that time there was no MediaRecorder, so Videomail is streaming image frames from the getUserMedia API over WebSocket to our server where the final video is encoded on FFmpeg before sending out that email. Mad science, but worked very well so far.

Due to Videomail's popularity, we're refactoring a lot. I'm researching various libraries for reuse, so that's why.

Back to topic ...

The first place Video.js helps is providing a consistent UI between browsers

Ah, perhaps you want to highlight that main goal in your README? Because it leaves the impression that the HTML video tag isn't good enough, hence my initial question.

Because I feel, we often over-engineer too much ...

... consistent UI between browsers.

I don't know and haven't researched nor studied the W3C papers about that yet.
Is the UI presentation of the HTML video tag defined in our Web standards or not?

Or users can pick their preferences, choose their preferred browser, instead of enforcing one appearance? I don't know. It's an interesting topic :)

All good. If you would like, I can raise a small PR to tweak your README to clarify the above?

[tomByrer]

Seems they're open to PRs, though adding dependencies & architecture changes are likely need steering committee approval.