Latest release: v2.0.0-alpha5
The rx-player is a Javascript library implementic a generic streaming video player using HTML5 Media Source and Encrypted Media extensions. It is entirely written in reactive-programming with ECMAScript 6.
It comes with a support for DASH and SmoothStreaming transports.
Building a streaming video player in javascript is a complex task due to the numerous interactions with the outside world it has to deal with. Whether they come from the user seeking at a particular moment of its movie, changing the current channel or the network congestion. The video player being the centerpiece of our applications, it needs to adapt very quickly to any of these inputs and stay resilient to various errors.
Many current video player implementations rely on classical object-oriented hierarchy and imperative event callbacks with shared mutable objects to manage all these asynchronous tasks and states. We found this approach to be the wrong abstraction to handle the complexity of a video player.
Rx on the contrary provides gracious interfaces and operators to compose asynchronous tasks together by representating changing states as observable stream of values. It also comes with a cancelation contract so that every asynchronous side-effect can be properly disposed when discarded by the system (this is still a controversial issue in the JS community).
This allowed us to implement some nice features quite easily. For instance, because in the rx-player all asynchronous tasks are encapsulated in observable data-structures, we were able to add a transparent retry system with a simple observable operator to declaratively handle any failure and replay the whole process.
Another example is the way we abstracted our transport layer into an observable pipeline, allowing us to support different type of streaming systems with its own asynchronous specifities. And because Rx is message-driven, this encapsulation allows us isolate the transport I/O into a WebWorker without any effort, or add an offline support for any pipeline implementation.
TODO
The demo is a small application written in React demonstrating a simple usage of the player.
To launch the demo yourself, run make demo and start a local webserver from the root directory of the repository. For instance:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080 # open http://localhost:8080/demoThe fastest way to use our player is to add this repository as a dependency of
your package.json dependency field:
npm install --save https://github.com/canalplus/rx-player/
You can then either use directly the dist/rx-player.js file:
<script src="node_modules/rx-player/dist/rx-player.js"></script>Or with tools like Browserify or Webpack you can import the player as a CommonJS or AMD dependency.
For the demo only:
- Font Awesome by Dave Gandy - http://fontawesome.io
A build is directly included at dist/rx-player.js directory if you don't
want to build it yourself.
To bundle the application yourself, we use make. The important task to know:
make clean
# build dist/rx-player.js
make build
# build dist/rx-player.min.js
make min
# build and watch file change for rebuild
make dev
# lint the code with jshint
make lintHere are the supported platform that we plan to target with this player.
| IE | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Windows | >= 11 | Nightly | >= 30 | |
| OX X | Nightly | >= 30 | >= 8 | |
| Linux | Nightly | >= 37 | ||
| iOS | ||||
| Android | >= 30 |
- Internet Explorer 11 only on Windows >= 8.
- To test on Firefox, use Firefox Nightly and add in about-config: media.mediasource.enabled true media.mediasource.ignore_codecs true
- Android version >= 4.2
A good way to know if the browser should be supported by our player is to go on the page https://www.youtube.com/html5 and check support for MSE & H.264.
Tests are only usable from the browser for now due to dependencies on DOM
elements. We plan to add support for node only tests asap.
# starts a local webserver, open http://localhost:9999/webpack-dev-server/test
make test