react-native-video

What is react-native-video?

The react-native-video package is a versatile video playback library for React Native applications. It allows developers to embed and control video playback within their mobile apps, supporting a wide range of video formats and providing various customization options.

What are react-native-video's main functionalities?

Basic Video Playback

This feature allows you to play a video from a given URI. The video is embedded within a React Native component and can be styled using standard React Native styles.

import Video from 'react-native-video';

const BasicVideoPlayer = () => (
  <Video
    source={{ uri: 'https://www.example.com/video.mp4' }}
    style={{ width: 300, height: 200 }}
  />
);

Custom Controls

This feature enables the default video controls, such as play, pause, and seek, providing a more interactive video playback experience.

import Video from 'react-native-video';

const CustomControlsVideoPlayer = () => (
  <Video
    source={{ uri: 'https://www.example.com/video.mp4' }}
    style={{ width: 300, height: 200 }}
    controls={true}
  />
);

Event Handling

This feature allows you to handle various video playback events, such as when the video ends or if an error occurs during playback.

import Video from 'react-native-video';

const EventHandlingVideoPlayer = () => (
  <Video
    source={{ uri: 'https://www.example.com/video.mp4' }}
    style={{ width: 300, height: 200 }}
    onEnd={() => console.log('Video has ended')}
    onError={(error) => console.log('Error:', error)}
  />
);

Looping Video

This feature enables the video to loop continuously, restarting automatically when it reaches the end.

import Video from 'react-native-video';

const LoopingVideoPlayer = () => (
  <Video
    source={{ uri: 'https://www.example.com/video.mp4' }}
    style={{ width: 300, height: 200 }}
    repeat={true}
  />
);

Other packages similar to react-native-video

react-native-video-controls

The react-native-video-controls package provides a customizable set of video controls for the react-native-video component. It extends the functionality of react-native-video by adding a set of default controls that can be easily customized.

react-native-youtube

The react-native-youtube package allows you to embed YouTube videos in your React Native application. It provides a simple interface for playing YouTube videos and supports various YouTube player features, such as autoplay, fullscreen, and video quality settings.

react-native-vlc-media-player

The react-native-vlc-media-player package is a React Native wrapper for the VLC media player. It supports a wide range of video formats and provides advanced playback features, such as network streaming, subtitles, and hardware acceleration.

README

react-native-video

A component for react-native, as seen in react-native-login.

Add it to your project

1. Run npm install react-native-video --save
2. Open your project in XCode, right click on Libraries and click Add Files to "Your Project Name" (Screenshot).
3. Add libRTCVideo.a to Build Phases -> Link Binary With Libraries (Screenshot).
4. Click on RCTVideo.xcodeproj in Libraries and go the Build Phases tab. Double click the text to the right of Header Search Paths and verify that it has $(SRCROOT)../react-native/React - if it isn't, then add it. This is so XCode is able to find the headers that the RCTVideo source files are referring to by pointing to the header files installed within the react-native node_modules directory. (Screenshot).
5. Whenever you want to use it within React code now you can: var Video = require('react-native-video');

Example

// Within your render function, assuming you have a file called
// "background.mp4" in your project. You can include multiple videos
// on a single screen if you like.
<Video source={"background"} style={styles.backgroundVideo}
       resizeMode="cover" repeat={true} />

// Later on in your styles..
var styles = Stylesheet.create({
  backgroundVideo: {
    position: 'absolute',
    top: 0,
    left: 0,
    bottom: 0,
    right: 0,
  },
});

Example code here.

TODOS

• Support require('video!...')
• Support other extensions than mp4 - mov would be useful for playing videos from phone's camera
• Switch to AVPlayer (0.1.6)
• Switch resizeMode to prop instead of style (0.1.7)
• Add paused prop (0.1.7)
• Add rate prop
• Add volume prop
• Add muted prop
• Add some way to get back the currentTime value (0.1.9 - onProgress prop)
• Add some way to get back the duration value (0.1.8 - onLoad prop)
• Add some way to interface with seekToTime
• Add support for captions
• Add support for playing multiple videos in a sequence (will interfere with current repeat implementation)
• Any other for other AVPlayer props