6 Years Building Video Players. 9 Billion Requests. Starting Over.
Blog post from Mux
The journey of Vidstack, originally inspired by frustrations with existing video players like Video.js and Plyr, has significantly influenced the development of Video.js v10. Starting with the creation of Vime in 2020, which aimed to bring modularity and predictability through Svelte, the project evolved into Vidstack with further innovations at Reddit. Vidstack introduced a Radix-like component library for video, emphasizing state management and customization, but faced challenges with web components and modularity. Despite these hurdles, Vidstack's architecture was praised for its state management and accessibility, though it struggled with monolithic design and maintenance burdens. This experience has informed the development of Video.js v10, which focuses on modularity, native framework integration, customizable skins, and a new state management system, promising a more flexible and user-friendly video player solution.