React Player v3 plan

[luwes]

Hi all, I wanted to share a rough plan what we had in mind for the next major version (v3) of React player.

There were several requests for adding custom player controls (UI) to React player and we think it would be really cool if React player could be made compatible with Media Chrome. Media Chrome will not be included by default, but the React player internal API will require some breaking changes so those layers can talk to each other.

Media Chrome supports players that conform to the HTMLMediaElement API and we build out many custom media elements over the years that do just that. All those media elements live since very recent in this monorepo https://github.com/muxinc/media-elements. They're all React compatible via the /react submodule import.

So in the spirit of compatibility and maintainability these elements will become the react-player "providers". The nice thing is that these API's will already be uniform coming into react-player.

The downside is that some providers that are in react-player are not yet in media-elements.
These include Dailymotion, Facebook, Kaltura, MixCloud, SoundCloud, Streamable, Twitch and Vidyard.

The goal is to support many of those again if there is enough interest but the first v3 will not include these by default.
The ability to add custom players will always be supported so that is an escape hatch until they get added.

If you have any thoughts on this please let us know. We'd love to get feedback.

[heff]

Will this change the API of React Player or just the Provider API? As in Media Chrome can speak directly to the Providers without going through the React Player API?

[luwes]

yes, we can keep the user React API via props the same. potentially add some events or so but keep it backward compatible.