Despite of some shortcomings html5 video player seems to be a reality on the web. The idea of having just a simple HTML tag representing video sounds tempting, however the reality is that you will have to write special code to cater to different browser, and probably even encoding your video in different formats, in order to get the video tag working.
What interests me is how JavaScript can make the video experience better competing with what the Flash players can do. Cristian Colceriu (opera website) has published a nice jQuery tutorial that shows how to add more controls to an HTML5 player.
This is how you can control the video tag using JavaScript: select the tag as an element, automatically have the video control methods
var videoElm = $("video");
videoElm.paly();
So once you know how to do this, you can use your typical jQuery click biding magic to create any control you want.