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!
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.
The build scripts assume the presence of tools which are readily available on Linux and Mac, such as bash, python, git, and java. For Windows, you can use cygwin.
The Closure Compiler is built with Java JRE 7, so you must have JRE 7 or newer in order to compile Shaka Player.
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.
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.shIf 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.
Up-to-date sources can be obtained from http://github.com/google/shaka-player .
The development process is documented in more detail in our generated docs, but in short, you can build the library by running:
./build/all.shCompiling Shaka Player requires Java JRE 7 or greater, but you can use the library in uncompiled mode without Java. Just generate the closure dependencies by running:
./build/gendeps.shThe 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.
Simply pull new sources from github and enjoy!
git pull --rebaseThe 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.
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.