Change the video playback speed using video.js

Your solution shows the issue here -- play is not a jQuery function but a function of the DOM element. You therefore need to call it upon the DOM element. You give an example of how to do this with the native DOM functions. The jQuery equivalent -- if you wanted to do this to fit in with an existing jQuery selection -- would be $('#videoId').get(0).play(). (get gets the native DOM element from the jQuery selection.)

It doesn't appear VideoJS Supports playback-rate directly, but from my understanding it's just a fancy wrapper for an HTML5 Video Element.

According to this stack overflow question/answer you can change the playback rate of HTML5 video directly on the DOM Element as referenced by the W3C HTML5 Video Wiki Entry.

You probably will have to side-step VideoJS to do this as the support doesn't look baked in. Also, there may be issues between browsers over support of this attribute.

As for simply adding controls, VideoJS implements a Javascript API you can use to control the element but it seems pretty limited to the most basic of controls (play/pause/goto/fullscreen/etc...)

The default controls the player has don't seem to be greatly customizable so if you wish to provide a clearer experience, you can probably disable the in-video controls and re-implement your own in html/dom/js underneath the video element.

Example:

With some really simple html & Javascript, you can wire up some simple controls.

HTML:

<video id="Vid" ...>
</video>
<div id="Controls">
 <a id="Play" href="#Play">Play</a> - <a id="Pause" href="#Pause">Pause</a>
</div>

JS:

_V_("Vid").ready(function() {
  var player = this;

  var playbutton = document.getElementById("Play");
  var pausebutton = document.getElementById("Pause");

  playbutton.onclick = function(event) {
    player.play();
  };

  pausebutton.onclick = function(event) {
    player.pause();
  };

});