Nice work but one comment: it's not clear to me why this is a jQuery plugin. In the setup you simply install a constructor (ie new $.BigVideo()) and that's it.
Unless there's more to it than that IMHO you'd be better served making it independent of jQuery. As popular as jQuery is, it's not a given.
Things from BigVideo that would be varying degrees of PITA to roll your own, pending the browser support:
* measuring window size
* creating a slider slider component without full <input type=range support>
* having appropriate snap points on that slider
* event model normalization
* pub/sub
* detecting when an image asset has loaded
* $(body).prepend() equivalence: insertBefore() can throw if someone's HTML has a comment comment directly inside the body tag (typical with HTML5 Boilerplate code)
Sure it'd be nice to have this be plain old JS, but as a developer you're signing up for a lot of pain that is merely just plumbing required to build your unique component. If BigVideo was targeting IE10 and everyone else, then we'd have a much better looking story in the code.
The exact reason I use jQuery for projects that aren't jQuery projects myself. The years of work and testing that have gone into jQuery make it an invaluable asset when working with Javascript and if you were to do what jQuery and dozens of contributors have been doing the past 5 years that would be one hell of a project.
This couldn't have come at a better time. I've just been tasked with creating a landing page with full-screen background scaling video and this plugin will make my life easier.
Looking at the source, he uses jQuery under the hood for (at least) element manipulation, event handling, and the ui-slider. So the effort is non-trivial, although it probably wouldn't be too difficult for someone to rewrite it if motivated.
As a fervent Mootools supporter I couldnt agree more, but at the same time i've pretty much given up trying to not use jQuery. Unfortunately it does seem like "jQuery Won" the core-framework wars. Use it or GTFO according to most web devs nowdawys. At least they're making it modular now so you can roll your own.
I was worried about that too, it looks cool, makes the text hard to read because its distracting, and ultimately might result in a bunch of pages which get less useful.
IMO, it probably wouldn't be best to put this on a page with content is the main factor. This is sort of cool for branding/marketing and can have a big impact in that arena.
Then, perhaps, it shouldn't do so on its project page and instead link to a demo. I found it extremely distracting just reading the project web page at all, never mind all the sudden fan noise.
However, this project and another that is on the frontpage of HN reminded me that projects like these should always come with a checklist of browsers that support them, even though it is meant to be implicit that all browsers should support the projects.
I don't know if there's a Travis CI-like solution available to solve this task, but it's be useful and relevant if there is.
As with all flashy (pun intended) web technologies, they can be effective if used with good taste and in moderation.
For example, the Path landing page uses a well designed background video and falls back to a simple image if the video isn't available:
https://path.com/
Now I'm still wondering how to autoplay a mp3 on page load and on subsequent clicks on a button. I've tried tinkering with an audio tag, never worked. The future is now. Kind of.
Set up a vm to check compatibility and this will take off. I've been using alot of plugins that overheated my laptop and this somehow doesn't do that so very nice
Thanks! I'll have to do some more work on getting it to work right on Firefox. It is a little different since FF doesn't have native h.264 support so it goes to a Flash fallback. I wanted to make it easy, so that you would just have one source video, rather than do the .ogg/.webm cascade. So...I'll have to work a little more on getting the flash fallback player to scale better/faster.
Running Nightly (Firefox alphas) and it works here. The fallback to Flash explains why it's so laggy here on OS X though, making it a distraction rather than a positive addition to the site.
Still, I like the idea behind it and I hope these things can be solved in later versions.
Unless there's more to it than that IMHO you'd be better served making it independent of jQuery. As popular as jQuery is, it's not a given.