Media Stream Player JS

Media Stream Player is a video player for Axis cameras based on React. The main idea is to define the video state entirely within specialized React components for each of the different supported formats (currently MP4 over HTTP, RTP over WebSocket, and still images). The main video player will only handle the intended video state (attached to handlers) and format. The player is built on top of the Media Stream Library which provides basic playing functionality for the different formats.

You can either import the Player or BasicPlayer and use them directly (see the example applications). If you want to build your own customized player, you can look at the latter component and build your own player, using the Container, Layer, and PlaybackArea components.

Basic requirements

This library specifically targets AXIS IP cameras because we make underlying API-calls to AXIS specfic APIs to get the video streams.

Firmware requirements

• For H.264 to work you need at least firmware 6.50 (LTS)
• For MP4 to work you need at least firmware 9.80 (LTS)

Structure

Installation

As a stand-alone element

If you don't use the player as part of you React app, the easiest way to use it is to download the media-stream-player.min.js file from the releases page and include it in your html file as a script:

<script src="media-stream-player.min.js"></script>

The bundle is built to support the browserslist "latest 2 versions, not dead", which should work on most modern browsers. If you need support for older browsers, you can use the (larger) legacy bundle media-stream-player.legacy.min.js instead, but note that this isn't tested, so you might run into some issues.

Then, you can use the <media-stream-player/> tag, similar to how you would use <video/> to include a video element, and provide the camera IP as hostname:

<media-stream-player hostname="192.168.0.90" />

You can find an example of this under examples/web-component.

Supported properties right now are:

Property	Comment
variant	Supported choices are basic or advanced. Refers to BasicPlayer and Player.
hostname	The ip address to your device
autoplay	If the property exists, we try and autoplay your video
autoretry	If the property exists, we try to auto retry your video on errors and if ended
secure	If the property exists, we will connect with https instead of http
format	Accepted values are JPEG, RTP_JPEG, RTP_H264, or MP4_H264
compression	Accepted values are 0..100, with 10 between each step
resolution	Written as WidthXHeight, eg 1920x1080
rotation	Accepted values are 0, 90, 180 and 270
camera	Accepted values are 0...n or quad depending on your device
	RTP_H264 / RTP_JPEG / MP4_H264 specific properties
fps	Accepted values are 0...n
audio	Accepted values are 0 (off) and 1 (on)
clock	Accepted values are 0 (hide) and 1 (show)
date	Accepted values are 0 (hide) and 1 (show)
text	Accepted values are 0 (hide text overlay) and 1 (show text overlay)
textstring	A percent-encoded string for the text overlay
textcolor	Accepted values are black and white
textbackgroundcolor	Accepted values are black, white, transparent and semitransparent
textpos	Accepted values are 0 (top) and 1 (bottom)

Example:

<media-stream-player hostname="192.168.0.90" format="RTP_H264" autoplay />

You may need to start a localhost server to get H.264 or Motion JPEG video to run properly. It doesn't work with the file:/// protocol. The easiest way to do that is Pythons simpleHttpServer.

First run

yarn build

to get a local copy of the minified file. Then go to the web-component example folder and type the following in you terminal:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

Then you can open up http://localhost:8080 to see the result.

Note that using anything other than the actual hostname you're hosting from will result in CORS errors for some video formats. You'll need to proxy the camera or load a page from the camera (in which case you can set window.location.host as the hostname).

As part of your React application

If you want to import the player as a React component into your own code, or use parts of the player, you'll need to install the package as a dependency. Make sure you have Node installed on your machine.

Then, to install the package:

npm install media-stream-player

or if you are using yarn:

yarn add media-stream-player

You will also need to install a number of peer dependencies such as luxon, which we use for date and time purposes, react/react-dom, styled-components, and media-stream-library. You can find an example of this under examples/react-app.

To run our example react app, you can start a vite dev server with:

MSP_CAMERA=<YOUR_CAMERA_HOST> yarn dev

for example

MSP_CAMERA=http://192.168.0.90 yarn dev

where you specify the IP of the camera you want to proxy as the MSP_CAMERA environment variable (default is 192.168.0.90). The vite dev server will proxy requests to the camera, so that you'll have no CORS issues for any format.

FAQ

Does this library support audio? Yes, yes it does. With a few caveats though.

• Make sure your AXIS camera actually supports audio
• Make sure the audio is enabled on the camera.
• It only works with H.264 and only after user interaction with the volume slider

Icons

The icons used are from https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/, which are available under the Apache 2.0 license, more information can be found on: http://google.github.io/material-design-icons

The spinner is from https://github.com/SamHerbert/SVG-Loaders, available under the MIT license.