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Lights Out: controls that glow in the dark. Remember the stars on your bedroom ceiling? Every player hides its controls when you stop moving. Lights Out switches the lights off instead. The controls become glow-in-the-dark plastic, fade to a faint afterglow you can always find, and recharge whenever the film gets bright. With the lights on it is plain cream plastic that fits any site. Light fill and a dark edge keep it readable over any footage, the same way subtitles are. Built on Video.js v10 with one small custom element; keyboard, touch, reduced motion, forced colours and right-to-left are all supported.
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Here’s my Video.js skin submission! I imagined what it would be like watching a video in a spacecraft from the future and left behind the conventional layout of the controls. What do we think?
Well done.
Kerf is a Video.js 10 skin built on one idea: cut the picture instead of covering it.
Most players float their controls over the video, then fight the footage for contrast with gradients and blur. Kerf cuts a notch into the player’s own frame and puts the controls there, on a solid surface in your product’s colour. They read the same over a white sky or a black night. Previews, menus and volume rise out of that frame from the control that opened them, and sink back when the film plays.
It’s built for modern SaaS and minimal products: one accent and one radius to set, plus light, dark or auto surfaces. It folds the controls away before the first play, and adds chapters, storyboard previews and captions as a notch. Every control works by keyboard, focus rings are visible, it honours reduced motion and forced colours, and it supports right-to-left layouts. axe-core reports 0 violations.
Plain HTML and CSS on @videojs/html with the official icons. Open source under Apache 2.0.
Love how the controls sit in the frame.
Tactile — Paper Key: a Video.js v10 skin you can press.
Tactile treats the player as a desk object, not a screen overlay. Before drawing any UI, we modelled a small keypad in Blender: paper-white keys with an ink rim, a ribbed fader cap and a black status display. We pressed it, lit it, and flattened it piece by piece into CSS. Keys latch (1 px down, with a 2 px accent rim), faders scrub, and one display pill always says what the player is doing: PLAY 1.0×, PAUSED, LOADING or END. Play is the only orange key and everything else stays matte, so the dock reads the same over bright snow and a night street. Three glazes and one accent token let it fit someone else's site.
Keyboard-first with a visible ink focus ring, 44 px targets, Esc closes every menu, forced colors and reduced motion supported. Source (Apache 2.0): github.com/promoparkllc/tactile-paper-key
