arabcoders/hls_player repository overview

⁠HLS Player

A video player that can play any video file in the browser using ffmpeg as backend.

⁠Introduction

I was impressed with how plex, jellyfin, emby and other media players were able to play any video file in the browser, and transcode the media on the fly, I wanted something simpler that I can integrate into my server management app, and I managed to make it work with the majority of the media files that I came cross, and I thought that the player might be useful for somebody else.

⁠Container Limitation

Sadly, I was not able to get a good alpine build with working hardware acceleration, so right now in the container build only software encoding works. However, the video player support hardware accel, if there is interest I may build different container that has hardware acceleration support.

⁠How does the player works?

When you select a video file, you will be presented with a screen that give you options on how to encode the video file, after you finish selecting what you want, and click Stream it will hand off the file to a controller that would segment the video file into chunks to support seeking, we use HLS protocol to support wide devices, we tested on iOS/chrome/firefox, and the defaults works.

⁠Install

create your docker-compose.yaml file

version: '3.3'
services:
    hls_player:
        image: arabcoders/hls_player:latest
        container_name: hls_player
        restart: unless-stopped
        environment:
            WS_UID: ${UID:-1000} # Set container operation user id.
            WS_GID: ${GID:-1000} # Set container operation group id.
        ports:
            - "8081:80" # HTTP server port
        volumes:
            - ${PWD}/:/config:rw # mount current directory to container /config directory.
            - /mnt/media:/storage:ro # mount your media files.

After creating your docker-compose file, start the container.

$ docker-compose up -d

Now, go to http://localhost:8081/ and browse your media.