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Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller

Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller
513 by Heff | 100 comments on Hacker News.
What do you do when private equity buys your old company and fires the maintainers of the popular open source project you started over a decade ago? You reboot it, and bring along some new friends to do it. Video.js is used by billions of people every month, on sites like Amazon.com, Linkedin, and Dropbox, and yet it wasn’t in great shape. A skeleton crew of maintainers were doing their best with a dated architecture, but it needed more. So Sam from Plyr, Rahim from Vidstack, and Wes and Christain from Media Chrome jumped in to help me rebuild it better, faster, and smaller. It’s in beta now. Please give it a try and tell us what breaks.