The first player we are going to be looking at in our series, Battle of the HTML5 Players, is arguably the sleekest HTML5 player available today. It’s also the easiest player to set-up and use on your website. After signing up for an account at my.sublimevideo.net , the player can be embedded with just a few lines of code. With this code you get a beautiful, self-updating, maintenance free, video player. Of course, their are some trade-offs for example, Sublime Video is completely proprietary and requires you to pay a monthly fee, but I’ll get into that below.
Now, let’s break it down by category:
- Usability: Sublime Video offers a minimalist, clean player control bar with the standard play/pause controls, volume slider, timeline and toggle to let users watch video in fullscreen. Sublime Video is the first and only player to enable native full screen HTML5 video playback. Currently, the player isn’t theme-able, but I think it looks good enough to blend into just about any website. If you want to know exactly how the Sublime Video player is integrated visit their quickstart guide to learn the full process.
- Size: Sublime does have several Javascript files and various images, but they are all hosted remotely on Sublime’s websites taking the load of your own site. It should be noted that because of this, the player relies on content hosted remotely on the Sublime Video Website and although they say they have had 100% uptime over the last 2 years, this might not be an option for everyone. However, despite the larger size, the player always felt snappy and responsive.
- Features: The Sublime Video Player offers users the ability to right click and switch between Flash and HTML5 players on the fly, as well as native HTML5 fullscreen playback.
- Price: The price is the major downside over most competitors. Offering plans ranging from $9.99/per site per month to $99/per site per month depending on your traffic, Sublime can be more expensive than the competition if you are using it on a higher traffic video site. There is also a big jump between the $9.99/per site per month plan which covers just 3000 views per month to the $19.90/per site per month plan, which accommodates up to 50 000 views per month. On the upside Sublime does offer what they call “Peak Insurance” which guarantees users some flexibility if they have an sudden, unexpected amount of views in one month.
- Compatibility: In our tests, Sublime Video player worked with all browsers and on all platforms remarkably well, as long as you provide the necessary files types (.mp4, .ogv, .webm are all supported). The player also fell back to a compatible video format automatically and played on everything we threw at it.
Overall, the Sublime Video Player provides an elegant, easy solution for displaying beautiful fully compatible HTML5 video although the proprietary, potentially expensive, cloud based solution might be too big of a trade-off for some users.
This is the first player we’ve reviewed in our series: Battle of the HTML5 Players.
Tags: html5
[...] first player we reviewed was the elegant Sublime Video Player. Though it is beautifully designed and hassle free, some users may have issues with the players [...]
I like the new look of the html5 player. is faster is better and my slow computer with crappy video card will not got slow anymore, nice job you guys!