shaka-player

What is shaka-player?

Shaka Player is an open-source JavaScript library for adaptive media streaming. It supports DASH and HLS formats and provides a wide range of features for media playback, including DRM support, offline storage, and live streaming.

What are shaka-player's main functionalities?

Basic Playback

This code demonstrates how to set up basic video playback using Shaka Player. It initializes the player with a video element and loads a DASH manifest.

const video = document.getElementById('video');
const player = new shaka.Player(video);

player.load('https://example.com/manifest.mpd').then(function() {
  console.log('The video has now been loaded!');
}).catch(function(error) {
  console.error('Error loading video', error);
});

DRM Support

This code demonstrates how to configure Shaka Player to support DRM (Digital Rights Management). It sets up license servers for Widevine and PlayReady and loads a DASH manifest.

const video = document.getElementById('video');
const player = new shaka.Player(video);

player.configure({
  drm: {
    servers: {
      'com.widevine.alpha': 'https://example.com/widevine_license',
      'com.microsoft.playready': 'https://example.com/playready_license'
    }
  }
});

player.load('https://example.com/manifest.mpd').then(function() {
  console.log('The video with DRM has now been loaded!');
}).catch(function(error) {
  console.error('Error loading video with DRM', error);
});

Offline Storage

This code demonstrates how to use Shaka Player's offline storage feature. It initializes the storage module and stores a DASH manifest for offline playback.

const video = document.getElementById('video');
const player = new shaka.Player(video);
const storage = new shaka.offline.Storage(player);

storage.store('https://example.com/manifest.mpd').then(function(content) {
  console.log('The content has been stored offline!', content);
}).catch(function(error) {
  console.error('Error storing content offline', error);
});

Live Streaming

This code demonstrates how to set up live streaming using Shaka Player. It initializes the player with a video element and loads a live DASH manifest.

const video = document.getElementById('video');
const player = new shaka.Player(video);

player.load('https://example.com/live.mpd').then(function() {
  console.log('The live stream has now been loaded!');
}).catch(function(error) {
  console.error('Error loading live stream', error);
});

Other packages similar to shaka-player

video.js

Video.js is a popular open-source HTML5 video player that supports a wide range of video formats and provides a plugin architecture for extending its functionality. Compared to Shaka Player, Video.js has a larger community and more plugins available, but it does not natively support DASH or HLS streaming.

hls.js

Hls.js is a JavaScript library that brings HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) to browsers with support for MSE (Media Source Extensions). It is specifically designed for HLS streaming, whereas Shaka Player supports both DASH and HLS. Hls.js is a good choice if you only need HLS support.

dash.js

Dash.js is an open-source reference client for the playback of MPEG-DASH content. It is maintained by the DASH Industry Forum and provides extensive support for DASH streaming. Compared to Shaka Player, Dash.js is more focused on DASH and may not have as many features for HLS or DRM.

README

Shaka Player

The Shaka Player is a JavaScript library which implements a DASH client. It relies on HTML5 video, MediaSource Extensions, and Encrypted Media Extensions for playback.

A generic DASH client can be difficult to implement, and the DASH standard does not always align well with the new browser APIs that DASH clients are built on. Our goal is to reduce this friction and make it easier to adopt these emerging web standards for streaming, without falling back to plugins.

We support both ISO BMFF (MP4) and WebM files (even in the same manifest), WebVTT for subtitles and captions, both clear and encrypted content, and multiple audio and subtitle languages (even in the same manifest). And best of all, it's free!

Dependencies

Most of the tools you need to work on the Shaka Player are included in the sources, including the Closure Compiler, gjslint, JSDoc, and Jasmine.

Mailing list

We have a public mailing list for discussion and announcements. To receive notifications about new versions, please join the list. You can also use the list to ask questions or discuss Shaka Player development.

Documentation

We have detailed documentation which is generated from the sources using JSDoc. A pre-rendered version of this documentation is available on the web at http://shaka-player-demo.appspot.com/docs/index.html . This will be updated with each release, but you can generate the same docs yourself at any time:

./build/docs.sh

If you are new to the project, we recommend you start by browsing the docs, in particular the tutorials. This landing page is very brief, and only covers the most basic information about the project.

Getting Sources

Up-to-date sources can be obtained from http://github.com/google/shaka-player .

Building

The development process is documented in more detail in our generated docs, but in short, you can build the library by running:

./build/all.sh

Running

The library comes with a test app that can be used to tinker with all of the library's basic functionality. The test app (index.html and app.js in the sources) is meant to be used by making the source folder available to a local web server and pointing your browser at it.

A hosted version of the test app is also available at http://shaka-player-demo.appspot.com/ for your convenience.

Updating

Simply pull new sources from github and enjoy!

git pull --rebase

Design Overview

The main entities you care about are shaka.player.Player, shaka.player.DashVideoSource, and shaka.player.DrmSchemeInfo. In short, you construct a player and give it a <video> tag, then you construct a DASH video source and give it a manifest URL and an optional DRM callback. Your DRM callback returns DrmSchemeInfo objects to describe your DRM setup. You load this video source into the player to begin playback.

The player handles high-level playback and DRM, while the video source deals with streaming and all of the low-level parts of adaptive playback. The DRM scheme info is an explicit set of parameters for DRM, and contains everything the library can't glean from a DASH manifest.

More detailed information and walkthroughs with fully-functional sample code can be found in the tutorials.

Contributing

If you have improvements or fixes, we would love to have your contributions. Please read CONTRIBUTIONS.md for more information on the process we would like contributors to follow.

Changelog

1.3.0 (2015-04-16)

Feature release, introducing live streaming and offline playback.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed playback and buffering of streams whose index is inaccurate.
• Fixed EME spec compliance.
  • https://github.com/shaka-project/shaka-player/issues/45
• Fixed FakeEventTarget exception handling.
• Fixed aggressive dead code stripping by the compiler.
• Fixed a bug in which subtitles were enabled by default without a subtitle language match.

Features:

• Added offline playback support.
  • https://github.com/shaka-project/shaka-player/issues/22
• Added offline support for encrypted content (on platforms which support persistent licenses).
  • https://github.com/shaka-project/shaka-player/issues/23
• Added live stream support.
  • https://github.com/shaka-project/shaka-player/issues/21
• Added support for header-based clock synchronization.
• Added support for inheriting Segment{Base,List,Template} across levels in MPDs.
• Add polyfill support for fullscreen events.
• Updated EME usage to the March 12 draft.
• Added Player.getAdaptationEnabled().
  • https://github.com/shaka-project/shaka-player/pull/31
• Added support for bandwidth restrictions and restrictions not based on license responses.
  • https://github.com/shaka-project/shaka-player/pull/36
• Added support for requireJS and improved support for commonJS.
• Sped up integration tests and improved test robustness.
• Bandwidth estimates can now be persisted across playbacks.
• Custom bandwidth estimator objects can now be injected into the Player.
• Improved EME v0.1b polyfill consistency with native EME in Chrome.
• Improved buffering and underflow mechanisms.
• Improved error reporting if DRM info is missing.
• Improved robustness in the face of HTTP 404 and 410 errors during segment fetch.
• Improved documentation for Role tags and multilingual assets.

Test app features:

• Example player controls in the test app.

Deprecated:

• The following methods on Player are deprecated. They will be removed in v1.4.0:
  • getCurrentResolution() (replace with video.videoWidth & video.videoHeight)
  • getCurrentTime()/seek() (replace with video.currentTime)
  • getDuration() (replace with video.duration)
  • getMuted()/setMuted() (replace with video.muted)
  • getVolume()/setVolume() (replace with video.volume)
  • play() (replace with video.play)
  • pause() (replace with video.pause)
  • requestFullscreen() (replace with video.requestFullscreen())

Broken compatibility:

• The license postprocessor callback is no longer given a Restrictions argument. See Player.getRestrictions()/setRestrictions().
• The suppressMultipleEvents flag has been dropped from DrmSchemeInfo, which changes the constructor signature. This flag interfered with key rotation.