A few weeks ago, I started working on a website project at work. One of its features involved video that filled the page’s background, to the edge of the window on all sides. There are lots of great examples of this effect out on the web. There are even some plugins, such as Tubular, but as far as I could tell, no plugin that worked exactly the way I needed. I needed more control over the functionality and to build a fluid player.

So, I thought, a perfect opportunity to build another cool plugin. I considered creating my own HTML5 video api, but after taking a look at Video.js and all the code that went into making that work, I decided, uh, no freaking way! Much better to stand on the shoulders of giants and use their API.

Next, I spoke to my boss about open sourcing it. We had just started a Github group account for the dev team in Chicago, so I put BigVideo.js up there as our first public repo. Hopefully, it will be the first of many.

Like I had done previously for Scrollorama, I released it to Hacker News. I was hoping and even expecting it to hit the front page, but was thrilled to see it hit #1.

There is still some work to be done getting the Flash fallback to work optimally, but all in all, I’d say it works pretty darn good. It is really neat seeing it pop up here and there and there on the internet. I have some more stuff in the works for this and other little projects, so stay tuned..