How are media players made on various web resources where you can watch movies or series online?

Question

Video broadcast

I know how to add the ability to watch videos using the HTML 'VIDEO' tag. Just link to the video (or add multiple sources), add subtitles with the 'TRACK' tag if needed. But this seems to be a banal way to add the ability to view a video file. Media players on various resources are much more complex. The matter is clearly not limited to one HTML 5. It even seems that the video is divided into parts, and each of them is loaded if its turn has come. You can't even download it, as is the case with the 'VIDEO' tag. Are there any guides on this topic? I would like to know how media players are made by various streaming services.

Answer 1

All HTML5 players are built around the video tag, but now many use HLS or DASH technologies, in which the video is broken into chunks - short fragments. These fragments are glued together in the player using the Media Source Extensions interface built into modern browsers and passed to the video tag. You can take the hls.js or dash.js libraries, or the players that use them (videoJS, playerJS, plyr, and so on).

Answer 2

It's called streaming and it's very expensive. Need an RTMP server for streaming and they require licenses