What is a good open-source/commercial web video player? Use Javascript? Flash?

Question

I'm basically looking for something that can play/stream a variety of formats if possible (or if not, to have an easy way for non-technies to convert them to the desired format). I'm also looking for something easy to setup - like including a javascript tag at the top of the page and then perhaps using a div, or just 1 line of script code to make it work. If it's flash, then have to be simple to setup too.

Any suggestions? I've never done this sort of thing before. I'm sure it's easy, but I have no idea what are the standard/defacto products so any help would be great.

Answer 1

I haven't used any of these before, but some Google searching turns up these two:

http://openvideoplayer.sourceforge.net/ This one can apparently switch between HTML5 and Flash video playback.

http://flowplayer.org/demos/installation/index.html This one seems simple to use; it requires two <script> tags and an <a> or <div> tag.

They both seem to support whatever formats their underlying technology supports. According to http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html, Flash supports FLV and MP4, as well as WebM, eventually. Chrome/Opera/Firefox support WebM. For codecs, H.264 is supported by Flash (and Chrome, I think), Firefox supports Theora, etc. The link has a rundown of everything.

Answer 2

http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/

JW Player is one of the more popular ones.