FVP

A plugin for official Flutter Video Player to support all desktop and mobile platforms, with hardware accelerated decoding and optimal rendering. Based on libmdk. You can also create your own players other than official video_player with backend player api

Prebuilt example can be download from artifacts of github actions.

More examples are here

project is create with flutter create -t plugin --platforms=linux,macos,windows,android,ios -i objc -a java fvp

Features

• All platforms: Windows x64(including win7) and arm64, Linux x64 and arm64, macOS, iOS, Android(requires flutter > 3.19 because of minSdk 21).
• You can choose official implementation or this plugin's
• Optimal render api: d3d11 for windows, metal for macOS/iOS, OpenGL for Linux and Android(Impeller support)
• Hardware decoders are enabled by default
• Dolby Vision support on all platforms
• Minimal code change for existing Video Player apps
• Support most formats via FFmpeg demuxer and software decoders if not supported by gpu. You can use your own ffmpeg 4.0~7.0(or master branch) by removing bundled ffmpeg dynamic library.
• High performance. Lower cpu, gpu and memory load than libmpv based players.
• Support audio without video
• Small footprint. Only about 10MB size increase per cpu architecture(platform dependent).

How to Use

• Add fvp in your pubspec.yaml dependencies: flutter pub add fvp. Since flutter 3.27, fvp must be a direct dependency in your app's pubspec.yaml.
• (Optional) Add 2 lines in your video_player examples. Without this step, this plugin will be used for video_player unsupported platforms(windows, linux), official implementation will be used otherwise.

import 'package:fvp/fvp.dart' as fvp;

fvp.registerWith(); // in main() or anywhere before creating a player. use fvp for all platforms.

You can also select the platforms to enable fvp implementation

registerWith(options: {'platforms': ['windows', 'macos', 'linux']}); // only these platforms will use this plugin implementation

To select other decoders, pass options like this

fvp.registerWith(options: {
    'video.decoders': ['D3D11', 'NVDEC', 'FFmpeg']
    //'lowLatency': 1, // optional for network streams
    }); // windows

The document lists all options for registerWith()

Error Handling

Errors are usually produced when loading a media.

_controller.addListener(() {
  if (_controller.value.hasError && !_controller.value.isCompleted) {
    ...

Backend Player API

import 'package:fvp/mdk.dart';

The plugin implements VideoPlayerPlatform via a thin wrapper on player.dart.

Now we also expose this backend player api so you can create your own players easily, and gain more features than official video_player, for example, play from a given position, loop in a range, decoder selection, media information detail etc. You can also reuse the Player instance without unconditionally create and dispose, changing the Player.media is enough. This is an example

VideoPlayerController Extensions

With this extension, we can leverage mature video_player code without rewriting a new one via backend player api, but gain more features, for example snapshot(), record(), fastSeekTo(), setExternalSubtitle().

import 'package:fvp/fvp.dart' as fvp;

fvp.registerWith(); // in main() or anywhere before creating a player. use fvp for all platforms.

// somewhere after controller is initialized
_controller.record('rtmp://127.0.0.1/live/test');

Upgrade Dependencies Manually

Upgrading binary dependencies can bring new features and backend bug fixes. For macOS and iOS, in your project dir, run

pod cache clean mdk
find . -name Podfile.lock -delete
rm -rf {mac,i}os/Pods

For other platforms, set environment var FVP_DEPS_LATEST=1 and rebuilt, will upgrade to the latest sdk. If fvp is installed from pub.dev, run flutter pub cache clean is another option.

Design

• Playback control api in dart via ffi
• Manage video renderers in platform specific manners. Receive player ptr via MethodChannel to construct player instance and set a renderer target.
• Callbacks and events in C++ are notified by ReceivePort
• Function with a one time callback is async and returns a future

Enable Subtitles

libass is required, and it's added to your app automatically for windows, macOS and android(remove ass.dll, libass.dylib and libass.so from mdk-sdk if you don't need it). For iOS, download and add ass.framework to your xcode project. For linux, system libass can be used, you may have to install manually via system package manager.

If required subtitle font is not found in the system(e.g. android), you can add assets/subfont.ttf in pubspec.yaml as the fallback.

DO NOT use flutter-snap

Flutter can be installed by snap, but it will add some enviroment vars(CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH and LIBRARY_PATH) which may break C++ compiler. It's not recommended to use snap, althrough building for linux is fixed, but it's not possible for android.

Screenshots