Tutorial: Quick Start

Because the RxPlayer exports a lot of functionnalities, you might want to quickly test basic use cases before you dive deep into the whole API documentation.

We will here learn how to simply load a video and to react to basic events.

Instanciating a Player

The first step is to instanciate a new RxPlayer.

Each RxPlayer instance is attached to a single video (or audio) HTML element, and is able to play a single content at once.

To instanciate it with a linked video element you can just do something along the lines of:

import RxPlayer from "rx-player";

const videoElement = document.querySelector("video");
const player = new RxPlayer({ videoElement });

videoElement is an RxPlayer option and will be the HTMLElement the RxPlayer will load your media on.

Despite its name, you can also give it an <audio> element. It will still be able to play an audio content without issue.

When you are ready to make use of more advanced features, you can look at the other possible options in the Player Options page.

Loading a content

The next logical step is to load a content (audio, video or both).

Loading a new content is done through the loadVideo method.

loadVideo takes an object as arguments. There is here also a lot of possible options, but to simplify we will start with just three:

• transport: String describing the transport protocol (can be "dash", "smooth" or "directfile" for now).

• url: URL to the content (to the Manifest for Smooth contents, to the MPD for DASH contents or to the whole file for DirectFile contents).

• autoPlay: Boolean indicating if you want the content to automatically begin to play once loaded. false by default (which means, the player will not begin to play on its own).

Here is a quick example which will load and play a DASH content:

player.loadVideo({
  url: "http://vm2.dashif.org/livesim-dev/segtimeline_1/testpic_6s/Manifest.mpd",
  transport: "dash",
  autoPlay: true,
});

Reacting to basic events

Now that we are loading a content, we might want to know:

• if it succeed
• if it failed
• when we are able to interact with the content

To do all three of those things, you will need to listen to player events. This is done through the addEventListener method.

This method works the same way than the native one you might already use on HTML elements.

For example, to know if a fatal error happened (this is an error which interrupted the playback of the current content), you will just have to do:

player.addEventListener("error", (err) => {
  console.log("the content stopped with the following error", err);
});

And to know if the player successfully loaded a content and if you can now interact with it, you can just do:

player.addEventListener("playerStateChange", (state) => {
  if (state === "LOADED") {
    console.log("the content is loaded");
    // interact with the content...
  }
});

There is multiple other events, all documented in the events documentation .

As the state is a central focus of our API, we also heavily documented states in the player states documentation.

Interacting with the player

We’re now ready to interact with the current content.

There is a huge list of APIs you can use. Some are useful only when a content is currently loaded (like play, pause, seekTo or setAudioTrack) and others can be used in any case (like setVolume, getVideoElement or loadVideo).

Here is a complete example where I:

1. Instanciate an RxPlayer
2. load a content with it with autoPlay
3. toggle between play and pause once the content is loaded and the user click on the video element.

import RxPlayer from "rx-player";

// take the first video element on the page
const videoElement = document.querySelector("video");

const player = new RxPlayer({ videoElement });

player.addEventListener("error", (err) => {
  console.log("the content stopped with the following error", err);
});

player.addEventListener("playerStateChange", (state) => {
  if (state === "LOADED") {
    console.log("the content is loaded");

    // toggle between play and pause when the user clicks on the video
    videoElement.onclick = function() {
      if (player.getPlayerState() === "PLAYING") {
        player.pause();
      } else {
        player.play();
      }
    };
  }
});

player.loadVideo({
  url: "http://vm2.dashif.org/livesim-dev/segtimeline_1/testpic_6s/Manifest.mpd",
  transport: "dash",
  autoPlay: true,
});

And now?

Now that you know the basic RxPlayer APIs, you might want to dive deep into the whole API documentation.

You can also read our next tutorial, on how to play contents with DRM, here.