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Jan 26th 2016 Read about the new heuristic that we are adding to Dash.js BOLA: Near-Optimal Bitrate Adaptation for Online Videos

Dec 23rd 2015 The ES6 Refactor has been merged into dev branch and is open for PR requests again. If you have and existing PR please close, refactor it and re-issue the PR against dev.

dash.js is an initiative of the DASH Industry Forum to establish a production quality framework for building video and audio players that play back MPEG-DASH content using client-side JavaScript libraries leveraging the Media Source Extensions API set as defined by the W3C. The core objectives of this project are to build an open source JavaScript library for the playback of DASH which:

Is robust in a real-world production environment
Has the best performing adaption algorithms
Is free for commercial use
Is both codec and browser agnostic
Implements best practices in the playback of MPEG DASH
Supports a wide array of features including in-band events, multiple-periods and cross-browser DRM.

For an up-to-date view as to the state of MSE support in browsers, look here.

dash.js License

All code in the dash.js project is covered by the BSD-3 license. This permissive license allows redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, without cost or any license fees. It is our intent that you use this code to freely build DASH players for personal, company internal, or commercial purposes.

Documentation

Before you get started, please read the Dash.js v2.0 Migration Document found here

Full API Documentation is available describing all public methods, interfaces, properties, and events.

For help, join our email list and read our wiki.

Quick Start for Users

If you just want a DASH player to use and don't need to see the code or commit to this project, then follow the instructions below. If you are a developer and want to work with this code base, then skip down to the "Quick Start for Developers" section.

Put the following code in your web page

<script src="http://cdn.dashjs.org/latest/dash.all.min.js"></script>
...
<style>
  video {
        width: 640px;
        height: 360px;
  }
</style>
...
<body>
   <div>
       <video data-dashjs-player autoplay src="http://dash.edgesuite.net/envivio/EnvivioDash3/manifest.mpd" controls></video>
   </div>
</body>

Then place your page under a web server (do not try to run from the file system) and load it via http in a MSE-enabled browser. The video will start automatically. Switch out the manifest URL to your own manifest once you have everything working. If you prefer to use the latest code from this project (versus the last tagged release) then see the "Quick Start for Developers" section below.

View the /samples folder for many other examples of embedding and using the player.

Quick Start for Developers

Reference Player

Download 'development' branch
Extract dash.js and move the entire folder to localhost (or run any http server instance such as python's SimpleHTTPServer at the root of the dash.js folder).
Open samples/dash-if-reference-player/index.html in your MSE capable web browser.

Install Core Dependencies

install nodejs
install grunt
- npm install -g grunt-cli

Build / Run tests on commandline.

Install all Node Modules defined in package.json
- npm install
Run the GruntFile.js default task
- grunt
You can also target individual tasks: E.g.
- grunt debug (quickest build)
- grunt dist
- grunt release
- grunt test

Getting Started

The standard setup method uses javascript to initialize and provide video details to dash.js. MediaPlayerFactory provides an alternative declarative setup syntax.

Standard Setup

Create a video element somewhere in your html. For our purposes, make sure the controls attribute is present.

<video id="videoPlayer" controls></video>

Add dash.all.min.js to the end of the body.

<body>
  ...
  <script src="yourPathToDash/dash.all.min.js"></script>
</body>

Now comes the good stuff. We need to create a MediaPlayer and initialize it.

var url = "http://dash.edgesuite.net/envivio/EnvivioDash3/manifest.mpd";
var player = dashjs.MediaPlayer().create();
player.initialize(document.querySelector("#videoPlayer"), url, true);

When it is all done, it should look similar to this:

<!doctype html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Dash.js Rocks</title>
        <style>
            video {
                width: 640px;
                height: 360px;
            }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div>
            <video id="videoPlayer" controls></video>
        </div>
        <script src="yourPathToDash/dash.all.min.js"></script>
        <script>
            (function(){
                var url = "http://dash.edgesuite.net/envivio/EnvivioDash3/manifest.mpd";
                var player = dashjs.MediaPlayer().create();
                player.initialize(document.querySelector("#videoPlayer"), url, true);
            })();
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

Module Setup

We publish dash.js to npm. Examples of how to use dash.js in different module bundlers can be found in the samples/modules directory.

MediaPlayerFactory Setup

An alternative way to build a Dash.js player in your web page is to use the MediaPlayerFactory. The MediaPlayerFactory will automatically instantiate and initialize the MediaPlayer module on appropriately tagged video elements.

Create a video element somewhere in your html and provide the path to your mpd file as src. Also ensure that your video element has the data-dashjs-player attribute on it.

<video data-dashjs-player autoplay src="http://dash.edgesuite.net/envivio/EnvivioDash3/manifest.mpd" controls>
</video>