Makkul

Hi everyone,
Been puzzling over this one for a bit now and can't seem to locate the answer anywhere else.  Long time lurker, first time poster!
I work in animation and have a gallery page where the background video is a short preview snippet of the video, and when you click the 'play button' the actual video pops up as a light box.
What I can't figure out is how to pause the background video once the play button is clicked (Otherwise it's pretty distracting behind the lightbox video)
I don't particularly mind if the video starts back up again after the lightbox video is closed, but it would be a bonus if it did.
It would be ideal if the solution didn't involve a jQuery as I already have a few of those going for other features and, from what I understand, they generally don't play nice with each other (though I may be wrong about that?)