From Basic to Pro: Building a Feature-Rich Next.js Video Player

Social media is increasingly dominated by video content–over 85% of people on the internet watch videos online each month. Video content, prevalent across platforms from social media to streaming services, is highly effective at grabbing and holding viewers’ attention. When your video loads slowly, keeps buffering and doesn’t work as it should, you might end up losing the audience’s interest.

While it is easier to embed a YouTube video, building a customized Feature-Rich Next.js video player can give you more control over playback, customization, and performance. In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about building a Next.js video player, and how Cloudinary can streamline the process for you.

In this article:

• What is Next.js and Why Use it for Video Playback?
• Setting Up a Basic Video Player in Next.js
• Enhancing the Next.js Video Player with Custom Features
• Optimizing the Next.js Video player with Cloudinary
• Make an Impact with the Next.js Video Player

What is Next.js and Why Use it for Video Playback?

Next.js is a React-based platform designed for high-performance, efficient web development. It has features like server-side rendering and static site generation that improve SEO and boosts site speed. These capabilities make it an excellent framework for building high-performing applications.

So, when it comes to the Next.js video player, it shines due to the quick load times and efficient rendering that ensures videos play with no delays. Plus, Next.js works well with image optimization and media platforms, making it a perfect fit for media-rich applications. If you’re looking to stream tutorials or host a video content library, Next.js is the right framework that makes everything look seamless.

Setting Up a Basic Video Player in Next.js

Getting started with the video player in Next.js is simple and doesn’t require you to have any advanced skills. In this section, we’ll guide you through the process of creating a functional HTML5 video player in the Next.js application.

Create a New Next.js Project

Step 1: Check if you have Node.js installed on your machine. If not, you can download it from nodejs.org.

Step 2: Open your terminal and run the following command to create a new Next.js project:

npx create-next-app@latest my-video-player

Step 3: After creating the project, navigate to the project directory:

cd my-video-player

Step 4: Run the development server to check if everything is works correctly:

npm run dev

Visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser. You should see the default Next.js welcome page.

2. Adding a Simple HTML5 Video Player

Now, let’s create the video player component. We’ll create a new component for the video player and use the <video> element with some basic attributes to enhance its functionality.

Step 1: Inside your project, create a components folder if it doesn’t already exist. Then, inside the components folder, create a new file called VideoPlayer.js.

mkdir components
touch components/VideoPlayer.js

Step 2: Open the VideoPlayer.js file and add the following code:

// components/VideoPlayer.js
export default function VideoPlayer() {
  return (
    <div>
      <video controls width="100%">
        <source src="/sample-video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
        Your browser does not support the video tag.
      </video>
    </div>
  );
}

Step 3: Put your video file in the public folder of your Next.js project. For example, add a file named sample-video.mp4 to the public folder. The src attribute in the <source> tag points to the video file in the public folder. In Next.js, files in the public folder are served statically at the root URL (/).

Step 4: Now, let’s use the VideoPlayer component in a page. Open the pages/index.js file and modify it as follows:

// pages/index.js
import VideoPlayer from '../components/VideoPlayer';

export default function Home() {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>My Next.js Video Player</h1>
      <VideoPlayer />
    </div>
  );
}

Step 5: Now, start your Next.js development server with npm run dev and visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser. You should see the video player with your video loaded and ready to play.

Attributes like loop, autoplay, control, and muted give users control over the enhancement of the usability of the player and the playback. Let’s take a quick look at what each of these does:

1. controls Adds default video controls like play, pause, volume, and fullscreen.
2. autoplay Starts playing the video automatically when the page loads.
   Note: Many browsers block autoplay with sound for a better user experience. Use “muted” with “autoplay” to ensure it works.
3. loop Loops the video continuously.
4. muted Mutes the video by default. Useful for autoplay scenarios.
5. poster Specifies an image to show as a thumbnail before the video plays.

3. Loading Video Files

Now you’re ready to load your videos, and you can source the videos from either external URLs or locally.

• Local Files: In the public folder, place your video, e.g., public/sample-video.mp4, and give it a reference with the relative path, for example, /sample-video.mp4.
• External URLs: Replace the src attribute with a link to your hosted video, like https://example.come/video.mp4

To ensure compatibility across all the major browsers, make sure that your videos are in the formats that are common like MP4, Ogg, and WebM.It ensures that the payback is smooth for all your users, irrespective of the device or browser they are using.

Enhancing the Next.js Video Player with Custom Features

To truly stand out with your Next.js application, you can enhance the video player with custom features that improve functionality and user engagement. With these interactive elements like custom controls, playback speed adjustments, and progress bars, you can create a more robust and user-friendly experience.

1. Custom Play/Pause Button

Replacing the browser controls with play and pause buttons helps you design a video player that’s compatible with your application theme. You can create customized buttons and give your users an appealing way to interact with your player. These buttons are linked to the video’s playback to help with playing and pausing whenever needed.

2. Adding Volume Control and Seek Bar

A seek bar and volume controls help you create user-friendly sliders that allow viewers to adjust audio and navigate through the video. The volume slider lets users adjust the audio levels, and the seek bar helps them jump to the parts of the video they want to watch.

JavaScript lets you have improved customization for your users to enjoy a smooth experience accessing different devices. These elements can also be modified based on user preference.

3. Implementing Fullscreen Mode

To enable full-screen mode in your video player, you need to provide users with an easy-to-use way to expand the video to fill their entire screen. This is usually achieved with a fullscreen button that, when clicked, triggers the browser’s fullscreen API. Full-screen mode enhances the viewing experience, making it especially useful for high-quality tutorials and immersive content.

The cross-browser compatibility is an important feature for the fullscreen to work with consistency. Every browser has a different way of entering fullscreen mode, and therefore, handling these variations is crucial by keeping a check on the browser-specific implementation. It ensures that users get a seamless full-screen experience across all browsers, be it Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.

4. Thumbnail Previews on Hover

To create a thumbnail preview feature, you’ll need to generate snapshots of the video and display them when users hover over the seek bar. This can be done by extracting frames from video at different intervals of time to show the corresponding thumbnails based on the cursor position of the user. Users can preview different scenes by referencing the seek bar’s position, which corresponds to specific timestamps.

Optimizing the Next.js Video Player with Cloudinary

Cloudinary is a media management platform that enhances video performance, delivery, and playback within the Next.js video player application. By integrating Cloudinary, developers can ensure a smooth playback across all browsers and devices.

Integrating Cloudinary with Next.js

First, set up a Cloudinary account and install the Cloudinary npm package in your Next.js project. By integrating Cloudinary with your video player, you’ll be able to manage video uploads, apply transformations on the fly, and offer optimized video content to your users.

Cloudinary streamlines media management, making it easy to optimize videos for faster loading and adjust resolutions effortlessly. Whether you need compression, resizing, or format adjustments, Cloudinary does it all. This ensures your Next.js video player remains responsive, efficient, and delivers a smooth viewing experience.

Optimizing Video for Fast Loading and Streaming

With Cloudinary’s automatic optimization and compression, videos play faster without any loss of quality. Using transformations, videos are converted into modern formats that dynamically adjust resolution, resulting in smaller file sizes.

By using adaptive bitrate streaming, Cloudinary delivers high-quality video by automatically adjusting the quality based on network speed and avoiding buffering issues. It guarantees rapid delivery and top-notch streaming for each user via the Next.js video player.

Using Cloudinary’s AI Features for Auto-Generated Thumbnails

The AI-powered tools from Cloudinary can help generate automatic video thumbnails, making it easier to set up preview images with minimal manual effort. It selects the key frames by analyzing video content to ensure that thumbnails represent different scenes accurately.

Generating thumbnails with Cloudinary enhances video navigation with dynamic previews, thus enabling users to jump to specific points quickly. This automation improves the Next.js video player, saving time by eliminating the need for making thumbnails manually.

Customizing Video Quality and Resolution Based on Device

Cloudinary adjusts the format and quality of the videos automatically, ensuring that desktop users get high-resolution playback, whereas mobile users get a lighter version that is compatible with small screens. Such customization prevents buffering and reduces the load times. When you integrate Cloudinary into your Next.js video player, you can deliver a seamless viewing experience with no compromises on the video quality.

Make an Impact with the Next.js Video Player

To build a fully functional and feature-rich Next.js video player, you need a solid basic setup, custom controls, and performance optimizations. Integrating Cloudinary helps improve video delivery with automatic optimization and thumbnail generation.

With Cloudinary, your video player loads faster and performs consistently across different devices, enhancing the user experience. Developers can customize and fine-tune features to create a player that meets their specific needs.

Transform your videos instantly with Cloudinary’s powerful API tools. Sign up for a Cloudinary account today and see how easy it can be.