next-video

Next video is a react component for adding video to your next.js application. It extends both the <video> element and your Next app with features for automatic video optimization.

• Smart storage: Store large video files outside of your git repo
• Auto optimized: Automatically optimize video files and deliver via CDN for better playback performance and quality
• Customizable UI: Choose from themes or build your own player controls
• Posters & Previews: Zero-config placeholder images and timeline hover thumbnails
• Wider compatibility: Use videos that aren’t supported natively by all browsers
• Analytics built-in (optional): See how often videos get watched and track video peformance
• AI-powered: Whisper captions coming soon...

import myVideo from '/video/files/myVideo.mp4';
import Video from 'next-video/video';

return <Video src={myVideo} />;

Setup

cd your-next-app
npm install next-video
npx next-video init

This will create a /video/files directory in your project which is where you will put all video source files.

It will also add a .gitignore file to the /video directory that ignores video files. Videos, particularly any of reasonable size, shouldn't be stored/tracked by git. Alternatively, if you'd like to store the original files you can remove the added gitignore lines and install git-lfs.

Remote storage and optimization

Vercel recommends using a dedicated content platform for video because video files are large and can lead to excessive bandwidth usage. By default, next-video uses Mux, which is built by the the creators of Video.js, powers popular streaming apps like Patreon, and whose video performance monitoring is used on the largest live events in the world.

• Sign up for Mux
• Create an access token
• Add environment variables to .env.local (or however you export local env variables)

# .env.local
MUX_TOKEN_ID=[YOUR_TOKEN_ID]
MUX_TOKEN_SECRET=[YOUR_TOKEN_SECRET]

Usage

Local videos

Add videos locally to the video/files directory then run npx next-video sync. The videos will be automatically uploaded to remote storage and optimized. You'll notice video/files/[file-name].json files are also created. These are used to map your local video files to the new, remote-hosted video assets. These json files must be checked into git.

npx next-video sync

You can also add next-video sync -w to the dev script to automatically sync videos as they're added to /video/files while the dev server is running.

// package.json
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "next dev & next-video sync -w",
  },

Now you can use the <Video> component in your application. Let's say you've added a file called awesome-video.mp4 to video/files

import awesomeVideo from '/video/files/awesome-video.mp4';
import Video from 'next-video/video';

return <Video src={awesomeVideo} />;

While a video is being uploaded and processed, <Video> will attempt to play the local file. This only happens during local development because the local file is never uploaded to your git repo.

Remote videos

For videos that are already hosted remotely (for example on AWS S3), set the src attribute to the URL of the remote file.

import Video from 'next-video/video';

return <Video src="https://www.mydomain.com/remote-video.mp4" />;

If the hosted video is a single file like an MP4, the file will be automatically optimized for better deliverability and compatibility.

If the hosted file is an adaptive manifest, like HLS or DASH, NextVideo will treat the video as if it has already been optimized.

Roadmap

v0

• Automatic video optimzation
• Delivery via a CDN
• Automatically upload and process local source files
• Automatically process remote hosted source files

v1

• Customizable player
• Connectors for additional video services
• AI captions
• Kitchen sink template

Trying it out locally

If you want to develop on this thing locally, you can clone and link this sucker. Just know...it's not a great time right now.

1. Clone this repo
2. cd into the repo
3. npm install && npm run build
4. cd ../ (or back to wherever you want to create a test app)
5. npx create-next-app
6. cd your-next-app
7. npx link ../next-video (or wherever you cloned this repo)