Summary

You’ve seen how HTML5 gives you the first credible alternative to third-party plugins. The incompatible codec support currently makes it harder than using plugins to simply embed video in a page and have it work cross-browser.

On the plus side, because video and audio are now regular elements natively supported by the browser (rather than a “black box” plugin) and offer a powerful API, they’re extremely easy to control via JavaScript. With nothing more than a bit of web standards knowledge, you can easily build your own custom controls, or do all sorts of crazy video manipulation with only a few lines of code. As a safety net for browsers that can’t cope, we recommend that you also add links to download your video files outside the <video> element.