What is Video Player?
A video player is hardware or software that enables the playback of a video. In earlier times, most video players were hardware-based, like VCR and CD players. Nowadays, video players that are widely used are majorly software-based. These video players run on phones, tablets, as well as browsers.
Popular Video Players
- VLC Media Player
- Media Element
- Flowplayer
- JW Player
- jPlayer
- Video.js
Features of a Video Player
Depending on the video player, here is a list of features you can expect:
- Playback controls: This includes basic playback options like play, pause, seek, rewind, fast forward, time display, and so on.
- Volume control: It enables users to control the volume of the video.
- Playlists: Users can create customized playlists and play videos in the order they prefer—for example, YouTube playlists.
- Ad insertion: They allow you to embed ads and track user engagement.
- Subtitles: Online video players can include on-screen subtitles or live captions—either as embedded text or added as a separate file.
- Normal and full-screen display: Users can choose whether to play video in a normal window or in full-screen mode without other video player elements visible.
- Watermarking and overlaying: You can embed video watermarks and overlays onto your video
- Video effects: Users can adjust the brightness, color contrasts, etc., of a video.
- Multilingual audio selection: It allows you to switch between different audio languages as per your preference.
- Video resolution: There are options to accommodate various resolutions starting from 240p, 360p, to 4K.
- Device support: HTML5 players, for instance, can adapt to different devices and operating systems.