React Video Player

By  on  

Streaming entertainment is a massive interest of mine as both a consumer and web developer.  My love for streaming entertainment dates back to the early days of RealPlayer and the misery of a million codecs.  Fast forward to today and I'm working a lot with ReactJS, as well as the dozens of streaming technologies like YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and so on.  That lead me to think:  is there a good open source component for embedding videos from popular video providers?

Let's check out ReactPlayer, a very simple but useful streaming video player component for ReactJS!

Using the ReactPlayer component is really simple:

import ReactPlayer from 'react-player';

class App extends Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <ReactPlayer
          url='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnwlWn603g4'
          className='react-player'
          playing
          width='100%'
          height='100%'
        />
      </div>
    );
  }
}

ReactPlayer provides a number of options for both general and service-specific playback, also providing a number of event callbacks and even multi-source playback options.

React Video Player

ReactPlayer is an awesome utility for embedding popular media sources in your own site.  The config is minimal and you can have any video service up and running in a few minutes.

Recent Features

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    39 Shirts &#8211; Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • By
    Create a Twitter AJAX Button with MooTools, jQuery, or Dojo

    There's nothing like a subtle, slick website widget that effectively uses CSS and JavaScript to enhance the user experience.  Of course widgets like that take many hours to perfect, but it doesn't take long for that effort to be rewarded with above-average user retention and...

Discussion

  1. So besides the fact of having many “ready-made” solutions available these days, is there a reason to not just code the component up myself? I have a requirement to display a video on a welcome overlay before the user enters the site (5mb before any optimizations. I was doing a quick search for any ‘gotchas’ before implementing, but every article seems to just lean on some library. I have no issue with that, I’m just a fan of figuring it out myself for learning purposes.

  2. yzj

    How to turn off relevant video functions when pausing

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!