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The new player API and SDK

The new player API and SDK is now available for you to use.

You can find instructions on https://github.com/vidbeo/player-api or on our developers site’s Player API page.

It gives you much more control over the player, providing methods to get/set a range of properties and also letting you listen to events. Those events can be set to trigger a callback function (for example to notify your page when the player is playing). Each method returns a Promise as they are now natively supported in all major browsers.

The new SDK can let you interact with an existing player or dynamically add one to the page. Use its options to set various attributes like colour, autoplay and muted.

The player API partners with our new embed code which now loads even faster. The initial HTML response is under 1KB and since it is served from edge locations all over the world, it should load within milliseconds. It then fetches additional data in the background. The first file to load is the thumbnail image. That too is now faster, optimized to return a WebP image where supported by the browser. All modern browsers support the new WebP format (and we fallback to use a JPEG where it is not supported). A WebP image can be around 1/3rd smaller than the equivalent JPEG yet look the same:

We observed that the average WebP file size is 25%-34% smaller compared to JPEG file size at equivalent SSIM index.

Source: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_study.

If you have any questions about the player API or any other part of the platform, please get in touch.

Updated: November 12, 2021