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Player states

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Player states

The player state, that you can obtain either with the getPlayerState method or through the playerStateChange player event, is a central part of our API: it is from this value that you will know:

  • when a new content finished loading
  • when the content is paused to build buffer
  • when the content is ended
  • as a generality, in what “state” is the player currently

As such, it is important this concept is understood when developping with the rx-player, which is exactly the point of this page.

List of possible states

Today the player can have one of these 9 possible states:

  • STOPPED
  • LOADING
  • LOADED
  • PLAYING
  • PAUSED
  • BUFFERING
  • SEEKING
  • ENDED
  • RELOADING

The STOPPED state

STOPPED is the default state of the player. It indicates that no content is playing.

To simplify state exploitation, STOPPED is also emitted as a transition state when loading a new content while another one was currently loaded (or loading). That way, you can just listen to the STOPPED state to know when the current content is not loaded anymore.

When the player encounters an error, it will also stop and switch to the STOPPED state.

The LOADING state

The LOADING state indicates that a new content is currently loading. It appears only after the STOPPED state.

That means that the player is currently downloading enough of the content to be able to play it.

While this state is active, most of the content-related APIs (like setAudioTrack) are not available. You have to wait for the LOADED state for that.

The LOADED state

LOADED appears only after a LOADING state, and indicates that the current content can now be played.

From this point onward, most of the content-related APIs (like setAudioTrack) are now available.

If the autoPlay loadVideo option has been set to true, the state will then switch to PLAYING directly. Else, the player will usually be paused and stay in the LOADED state (there is some edge cases, see the “Possible state transitions” chapter for more information).

The PLAYING state

Indicates that the player is currently playing the content.

The PAUSED state

Indicates that the player is currently paused in the content.

The BUFFERING state

The content is paused because it needs to build buffer.

The player will not play until it gets out of this state.

The SEEKING state

The content is paused because it needs to build buffer after seeking in the content (this can be seen as a special BUFFERING case).

The player will not play until it gets out of this state.

The ENDED state

The player reached the end of the content.

If the stopAtEnd player option has been set to true or not set, the player will immediately stop the content. In that case, the ENDED state can be considered like the STOPPED state - in terms of what you can do.

Else, it should now be paused at the last frame if a video content is available at this time and this state acts like what you can expect from HTML5 playback:

  • when seeking when the content is ended, you will be paused (even if you were playing before)

  • after calling play, you will play back from the beginning

The RELOADING state

This state indicates that the player needs to “re-load” then content.

This can happen for different reasons:

  • When you switch the video track for another one, when the previous one was currently decoding.

  • When you update manually the audio and video bitrate through respectively the setAudioBitrate and setVideoBitrate APIs (Only if you set the manualBitrateSwitchingMode loadVideo option to "direct").

In those cases, we need to stop and reload the content on the browser-side, due to browser limitation.

While this state is active, multiple player API are unavailable:

  • you cannot play or pause
  • you cannot seek
  • you cannot obtain the position or duration
  • you cannot get or switch the available video, text or audio tracks.
  • you cannot get or switch the available video or audio bitrates.

This is why we sometime recommend to manage this state as if it was the LOADING state (where those APIs - and other - are also not available).

However, the player won’t go to the LOADED state after RELOADING, you will instead know that it had finished reloading simply when it goes out of this state (see the “Possible state transitions” chapter for more information).

Possible state transitions

The player goes from one state to another during runtime but those changes does not happen at random. There is actually possible state transitions (like from STOPPED to LOADING) and impossible ones (like from LOADING to SEEKING).

We will list here every possible state transitions. Note that we can never have two times the same state consecutively.

From STOPPED:

  • LOADING: a new content begin to load

From LOADING:

  • LOADED: the loading content was loaded succesfully and can now be played (most of the content-related APIs can also be used from this point)

  • STOPPED: Either:

    • You stopped the current through the stop method.
    • You are loading a new content.
    • An error happened which made it impossible to load the content. The corresponding error can be found either through the getError method method or through the playerStateChange player event.

From LOADED:

  • PLAYING: The content started to play.

  • SEEKING: A user seeked in the content.

  • ENDED: You are at the end of the content. Calling play will play back from the beginning.

  • RELOADING: The content needs to be reloaded.

  • STOPPED: Either:

    • You stopped the current through the stop method.
    • You are loading a new content.
    • An error happened which made it impossible to play the content. The corresponding error can be found either through the getError method method or through the playerStateChange player event.

From PLAYING:

  • PAUSED: The content is paused.

  • SEEKING: A user seeked in the content.

  • BUFFERING: The player needs to pause to download content.

  • ENDED: You are at the end of the content. Calling play will play back from the beginning.

  • RELOADING: The content needs to be reloaded.

  • STOPPED: Either:

    • You stopped the current through the stop method.
    • You are loading a new content.
    • An error happened which made it impossible to play the content. The corresponding error can be found either through the getError method method or through the playerStateChange player event.

From PAUSED:

  • PLAYING: The content plays (is un-paused).

  • SEEKING: A user seeked in the content.

  • BUFFERING: The player needs to pause to download content.

  • ENDED: You are at the end of the content. Calling play will play back from the beginning.

  • RELOADING: The content needs to be reloaded.

  • STOPPED: Either:

    • You stopped the current through the stop method.
    • You are loading a new content.
    • An error happened which made it impossible to play the content. The corresponding error can be found either through the getError method method or through the playerStateChange player event.

From BUFFERING:

  • PLAYING: The content plays (and finished buffering)

  • PAUSED: The content is paused (and finished buffering)

  • ENDED: You are at the end of the content. Calling play will play back from the beginning.

  • RELOADING: The content needs to be reloaded.

  • STOPPED: Either:

    • You stopped the current through the stop method.
    • You are loading a new content.
    • An error happened which made it impossible to play the content. The corresponding error can be found either through the getError method method or through the playerStateChange player event.

From SEEKING:

  • PLAYING: The content plays (and finished to seek)

  • PAUSED: The content is paused (and finished to seek)

  • ENDED: You are at the end of the content. Calling play will play back from the beginning.

  • RELOADING: The content needs to be reloaded.

  • STOPPED: Either:

    • You stopped the current through the stop method.
    • You are loading a new content.
    • An error happened which made it impossible to play the content. The corresponding error can be found either through the getError method method or through the playerStateChange player event.

From ENDED if the stopAtEnd player option has been set to true or not set:

  • STOPPED: Only state transition possible here. Happens if either:
    • You stopped the current through the stop method.
    • You are loading a new content.

From ENDED if the stopAtEnd player option has been set to false:

  • PLAYING: The play method was called. The content plays back from the beginning.

  • PAUSED: A user seeked into a part of the content already-downloaded. The content is paused after the seek, regardless of if you were paused before reaching the ENDED state.

  • SEEKING: A user seeked in the content.

  • RELOADING: The content needs to be reloaded.

  • STOPPED: Either:

    • You stopped the current through the stop method.
    • You are loading a new content.
    • An error happened which made it impossible to play the content. The corresponding error can be found either through the getError method method or through the playerStateChange player event.

From RELOADING:

  • PLAYING: The content finished to reload and was not paused before reloading.

  • PAUSED: The content finished to reload and was paused before reloading.

  • ENDED: The content finished to reload and you are at the end of the content. Calling play will play back from the beginning.

  • STOPPED: Either:

    • You stopped the current through the stop method.
    • You are loading a new content.
    • An error happened which made it impossible to reload the content. The corresponding error can be found either through the getError method method or through the playerStateChange player event.