React TV Player

A React video player component for TV devices, with customisable buttons and arrow key navigation. It can play a variety of URLs including file paths, YouTube, HLS and Dash streams.

Click on the image to try out the demo on a desktop browser

Usage

npm install react-tv-player

import React from "react";
import { TVPlayer } from "react-tv-player";

// Render a YouTube video player for TV
<TVPlayer url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkVqJ1SGeL0" />;

Background

In the dynamic landscape of the TV industry, I’ve dedicated years to working with various video players. During this journey, two persistent challenges surfaced time and again: performant UI navigation and compatible streaming protocols. These hurdles often forced us to heavily customise players and tackle media encoding difficulties, leading to added costs and frustrating delays. 😫

Why React TV Player?

Enter React TV Player, an innovative open-source component that seamlessly integrates with your React applications. It brings forth a media player tailored for TV experiences, complete with intuitive arrow key and cursor navigation. 📺 🎮

What Sets It Apart?

But that’s not all. React TV Player isn’t just another player. It’s a versatile solution that handles HLS and Dash streams effortlessly. What’s more, it tackles the formidable challenge of playing YouTube videos – yes YouTube – eliminating the need for custom video encoding when it’s not necessary. 🎉

How Does It Work?

Under the hood, this component harnesses the power of open-source libraries like Norigin Media’s spatial navigation hook. It builds upon the excellence of React Player, which utilises hls.js and dash.js. Powered by React TypeScript (although you don’t need to use TypeScript to make the most of it), this library is packaged efficiently using Vite, making integration a breeze. 🙌

Demo

The demo source code App.tsx illustrates how the component can be initialised with metadata, custom buttons, preview images and multiple media, enabling the user to cycle through videos with next/previous buttons and handle actions such as the Like button.

<TVPlayer
  title={mediaList[mediaIndex].title}
  subTitle={mediaList[mediaIndex].subTitle}
  url={mediaList[mediaIndex].url}
  light={mediaList[mediaIndex].preview}
  customButtons={customButtons}
  mediaCount={mediaList.length}
  onLikePress={handleLike}
/>

Here is a short video of the demo runnning on a browser:

react-tv-player-demo-480p.mov

Props

The full list of props are listed below. Media related values such as playing, loop and muted are also mapped to state which can be accessed via the useTVPlayerStore hook instead of updating props.

Callback props

Callback props take a function that gets fired on various player events and UI button actions:

Custom Buttons

As illustrated in the sample demo app, the player can be overridden with custom buttons. There is a selection of pre-built action types with their own icons and behaviours or you can add your own with the “custom” action type.

import { TVPlayer, TVPlayerButtonProps } from "react-tv-player";
import { faGithub } from "@fortawesome/free-brands-svg-icons";

const customButtons: TVPlayerButtonProps[] = [
  { action: "loop", align: "left" },
  { action: "like", align: "left" },
  { action: "previous", align: "center" },
  { action: "playpause", align: "center" },
  { action: "next", align: "center" },
  { action: "mute", align: "right" },
  {
    action: "custom",
    align: "right",
    label: "About",
    faIcon: faGithub,
    onPress: () => {
      window.location.href = "https://github.com/lewhunt/react-tv-player";
    },
  },
];

<TVPlayer
  url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkVqJ1SGeL0"
  customButtons={customButtons}
/>;

useTVPlayerStore hook

For more control you can import the useTVPlayerStore custom hook to globally access player state (zustand store). View the sample app and the TVPlayerUI inner component for examples of use. Below shows the basics:

// 1. import useTVPlayerStore
import { TVPlayer, useTVPlayerStore } from "react-tv-player";

// 2. get state values (there are more availble, see TVPlayerUI.ts for reference)
const actions = useTVPlayerStore((s) => s.actions);
const playing = useTVPlayerStore((s) => s.playing);
const player = useTVPlayerStore((s) => s.player);
const likeToggle = useTVPlayerStore((s) => s.likeToggle);
s;

const logPlaybackState = () => console.log(playing);

//3. set state using the actions object
const handleLike = () => {
  console.log("like button pressed");
  actions.setLikeToggle(!likeToggle);
};

const togglePlayback = () => {
  actions.setPlaying(!playing);
};

//4. access player instance methods via the player state
const customSeek = () => player.seekTo(player.getCurrentTime() + 10);

<TVPlayer
  url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkVqJ1SGeL0"
  onLikePress={handleLike}
/>;

Instance Methods

Use the state’s player reference – as in the above example – to call instance methods on the player.

DRM Support

You can use HLS AES Encryption, but it currently does not support Widevine, FairPlay or PlayReady DRM out of the box. However, when playing files it renders a video tag which can be accessed with the getInternalPlayer() instance method, mentioned above. So there is scope to hook into hls.js and dash.js for further DRM integration if desired. More work on this is on the future roadmap.

Device Support

The library has been put through some initial testing on desktop web browsers and TV web app platforms such as Amazon FireTV, Samsung Tizen, Xbox UWP and LG webOS. More checks will be carried out over the next few months. Generally TV devices post-2018 will be better supported as they’ll have more modern Chromium browsers.

Due to various restrictions, React TV Player is not intended to work properly on smaller mobile devices. The UI is designed for widescreen displays and YouTube player documentation explains that certain mobile browsers require user interaction before playing.

You can use a desktop browser with arrow-keys to simulate the TV experience.

GitHub

View Github