Introducing FleetPlayer: A Headless, TypeScript-First HLS Video Player Engine

Building a custom video player on the web can be a frustrating experience. You often find yourself wrestling with bulky, pre-packaged libraries that inject their own DOM elements, styles, and bloated UI components. If you just want complete control over your player's look and feel while relying on a solid streaming engine under the hood, your options are surprisingly limited. That’s exactly why I built FleetPlayer. FleetPlayer is a high-performance, framework-agnostic, and completely headless HLS video player engine built with TypeScript and Media Source Extensions (MSE). Here is a look at what it does, why a "headless" approach matters, and how you can use it in your next project. Why Headless? In modern frontend development, the "headless" architecture has taken over UI components (think Headless UI or Radix). It separates the complex state management and business logic from the visual representation. FleetPlayer brings this exact philosophy to video streaming. It handles the heavy l