Created Video.js & Media Chrome; founder of Mux & Zencoder.
San Francisco, CA
Joined May 2008
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Steve Heffernan retweeted
On 29 April 2010, Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash", an open letter giving six reasons iPhones and iPads would not run Adobe's plugin. It changed how the web plays video.
Jobs argued that flash was proprietary, crashed Macs, had a poor security record, drained batteries, relied on mouse hovers touchscreens lack, and put a third-party layer between Apple and its developers.
Apple backed open web standards instead (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript) and H.264 video. Critics noted H.264 was patented too. It didn't matter. Adobe dropped mobile Flash in 2011, YouTube made HTML5 its default in 2015, and Adobe ended Flash support on 31 December 2020.
That left every site that wanted video on iPhones and iPads with a problem: play without a plugin, on an HTML5 video element that was new and inconsistent.
Video.js, a weekend experiment by Steve Heffernan at Zencoder, was one of the first soltuions.
Our upcoming film tells that story, and what happened in 2025, when Steve came back and Video.js started over.
Video.js: The Documentary is coming...
Trailer: Thursday 29 October at 11:30am PDT
Premieres Live on 5 November on CultRepo YT at 10:30am PST
@MuxHQ @videojs @heff @jondahl @mihar_22 @luwes @sam_potts
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Plyr is now officially deprecated and it's time to give Video.js 10 a whirl! plyr.io/
Thanks for all the support over the years! 🙏
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Friends ran for 10 seasons.
David Tennant was the 10th Doctor Who.
The Great Longneck Migration was the 10th Land Before Time.
VJS 10 is now GA. Smol, customizable, and plays nice with your agents so they can help you migrate like Littlefoot.
videojs.org/blog/videojs-10
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Reboot time, baby. After 16 years, we teamed up with Plyr, Vidstack and Media Chrome to make the open source player that the web deserves (again). Check out the v10 blog post, try it out, and give us feedback.
videojs.org/blog/videojs-v10…
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Vidstack, Media Chrome, Plyr. Now we're building one player together — Video.js v10, from the ground up.
Here's my part of the story.
mux.com/blog/6-years-buildin…
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Announcing DEV's Worldwide Show and Tell Challenge presented by @MuxHQ!
📹Record 1-min. pitch video about your project
💡Previous projects/submissions welcome!
🦈"Shark Tank" inspired judging criteria
💰$3000 USD in prizes!
dev.to/devteam/devs-worldwid…
#ShowandTellChallenge #webdev
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Video.js is getting completely rebuilt.
Created by our co-founder @heff, we're stepping up as the new corporate steward, and are doing a complete rewrite: composable and framework-native.
Shoutout to the Video.js team: @gkatsev, Garrett Singer, @luwes, @mihar_22, @sam_potts, @cjpillsbury, @QualabsUy, and @CastLabs.
Read Steve’s blog: mux.com/blog/videojs
Check out the tech preview announced at Demuxed: v10.videojs.org
Kick the tires, and let us know what you think. This is just the beginning of what we can build together.
ALT Steve presenting Video.js announcement at Demuxed
ALT Steve showing slide with worldwide usage data.
ALT Steve showing slide with tech contributors on the project.
ALT Steve showing slide asking people to check out the tech preview.
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Watch Christina's player overview video here:
xitter.cf/christina_coder/status…
CEO of writing terrible software, reporting for duty 🫡
This is my submission to the @codetv_dev + @MuxHQ worst video player challenge 💥
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Doing video on the web really, really well is hard. Just today a customer asked me for help on why their videos worked on Chrome but not Safari iOS 🥴
Excited to have @muxhq join the @vercel marketplace to make <video> a great DX and UX for all 🙌
Mux Video is now available directly in the @vercel marketplace with the new Mux + Vercel integration
Player.style is live! Media player themes built with web components. Would love your feedback. There’s also a conversation happening on Hacker News.
producthunt.com/posts/player…
Steve Heffernan retweeted
We built an open source set of web components for building media players called Media Chrome. I'm really proud of it!
But, tbh, there was a lot of "draw the rest of the owl" vibes to actually make a nice player. I'm pumped to launch the rest of the owl:
producthunt.com/posts/player…
Steve Heffernan retweeted
next-video supports slotted poster images (next/image) now for faster and more optimized video previews! check it out github.com/muxinc/next-video
ALT code snippet showing usage of next-video and next/image
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Substack is for video.
Mux is for Substack.
Huge props to Substack on the launch of their expanded video experience!
Today we’re excited to expand our video capabilities to support the great shows already being produced on Substack and to enable new types of subscriber-supported work built around video. read.substack.com/p/substack…
Great work team!
<Video /> is the new <Image /> – Great DX by @muxhq
next-video.dev
Media Chrome (web components for video players) is now 1.0. Go forth and put in prod. mux.com/blog/media-chrome-tu…
@MuxHQ #HTML #javascript #webcomponents
Currently reading the Web Platform Design Principles...for fun. I'm way too deep in this #webcomponents thing. And also this is a great resource for any API design. w3.org/TR/design-principles/
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Introducing Mux Meet → mux-meet-demo.vercel.app
It's an open-source template for building video conferencing apps – think Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams.
Built with @nextjs, @vercel, and @MuxHQ by the talented @liam_lindner 🤩
Steve Heffernan retweeted
Mux Player. Now in GA. And now with so many customizations (just like you asked.) Have at it, friends: mux.com/player
From my @demuxed ⚡️ talk yesterday: thanks to web components you're now just one HTML tag away from using Shaka Player in your web app.
github.com/muxinc/shaka-vide…
cc @GoogleChromeDev since Joey and Shaka apparently aren't on Twitter 🙃
