There’s a rite of passage you might’ve gone on if you’re a web developer. You embed your first YouTube video and all of a sudden… wham! 3MB of

Why are video players so big? A trip down the rabbit hole of video playback engines

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-30 21:30:38

There’s a rite of passage you might’ve gone on if you’re a web developer. You embed your first YouTube video and all of a sudden… wham! 3MB of JavaScript load. And it’s not just YouTube; Mux Player is pretty big, too.

We have ways of dealing with this. Most boil down to showing a facade while you lazy-load your player. But we’re not here to talk about lazy-loading. (We already did that here and here!) We’re here to talk about why video players are so big.

After all, lazy-loading isn’t the best user experience. And if you don’t lazy-load, these big JavaScript packages might negatively impact your web vitals or video QoE metrics like startup time… or both. What do you get in exchange for that bundle size? And can anything be done to make it smaller?

This rabbit hole goes deep. You’ll learn more about video playback engines than you might expect. But before we get there, let’s start simple. Let’s ask, what is a video player, anyway?