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
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Kwicks

    One of the effects that made me excited about client side and JavaScript was the Kwicks effect.  Take a list of items and react to them accordingly when hovered.  Simple, sweet.  The effect was originally created with JavaScript but come five years later, our...

  • By
    Build a Calendar Using PHP, XHTML, and CSS

    One of the website features my customers love to provider their web users is an online dynamic calendar. An online calendar can be used for events, upcoming product specials, memos, and anything else you can think of. I've taken some time to completely...

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!