For a few weeks I've been contributing to the open source "VideoJS" player at the behest of Telly (formerly TwitVid). Telly is doing a major rollout of the technology, which will make it one of the first major video services to deploy an HTML5 solution as the default technology.
Still, like most video libraries, Telly encodes their content with the H.264 codec, since it is the best way to reach mobile devices. Unfortunately, this forces many desktop browsers (such as Firefox and Opera), which would otherwise be HTML5-ready, to rely on Flash to display the video. This is in addition to appearing on browsers that just aren't HTML5 compatible, such as IE8, which still commands considerable market share. So the new Flash fallback player needed to be just as robust as both the new HTML5 player, and the old Flash player that was being phased out.
The project attempts to use the same JavaScript and CSS-based controls on top of both an HTML5 video implementation and a Flash fallback, allowing for a more consistent experience across browsers. Unfortunately, the Flash implementation as it existed on GitHub was lacking a few features that Telly required to maintain parity with the old Flash-only player they were attempting to replace. I was contracted to fill in the gaps.
