About
Kaltura's video player is a fast-loading, reliable, and customizable HTML5 player designed for an exceptional viewing experience. It supports rich media playback, including multi-stream video, multiple audio tracks, and interactive features, while offering intuitive controls for play/pause, skipping, adjusting video quality, selecting audio or subtitles, and changing playback speed.
Table of Contents
Key features
Player controls
By default, the Kaltura Player includes play/pause controls and lets you skip forward or back by 10 seconds. It also shows the total video duration and your current position.
Quality / Speed selection
The Kaltura Player lets you set video quality automatically or manually. You can also adjust playback speed, with default options like 0.5x, normal, 2x, and 4x, or customize speeds based on your needs.
If you're using Safari, you might notice that the quality selection option is missing. This is because Safari uses adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS), which automatically adjusts the video quality for you, ensuring smooth playback.
Picture in Picture
Picture-in-Picture (PiP) lets you watch videos in a floating window that stays on top, even when switching tabs or scrolling. On mobile, it uses native PiP functionality (iOS 14+ and Android 8+), so you can keep watching while using other apps or browsing.
Viewability ensures the player stays visible during playback, which is key for bandwidth efficiency.
- Floating player: Minimizes to the bottom corner if less than 50% of the player is visible.
- Auto-pause: Playback pauses when less than 50% of the player is in view, saving bandwidth.
- Auto-play: Starts playback only when the player is fully in view.
Timeline scrubber
The timeline lets you navigate through content with preview thumbnails for a better viewing experience. It can be customized with markers for chapters, highlights, or other use cases, with options to adjust their shape, color, and images.
Accessibility
The Kaltura Player is fully accessible and supports:
- Keyboard navigation: Control playback with arrows, tab, space, enter, or escape keys.
- Screen reader compatibility: Each control has an aria-label, so screen readers can announce the content.
- Customizable captions: Adjust caption styles for readability.
The player also adheres to color contrast guidelines to enhance visibility for all users.
Audio language and captions
Select audio and caption languages, and the player will remember your choice for future videos. Captions can be styled and repositioned.
Responsiveness
The Kaltura player automatically adjusts to different screen sizes for playback on any device.
Screen orientation
On mobile browsers, the application can lock the screen orientation (e.g., to portrait) when switching to full screen.
Engagement tools
The Kaltura Player includes several features to drive engagement and by that increase viewership.
Keep your users engrossed in your content by directing their attention after they finish watching their chosen asset and even when they interact with other content sites.
Playlist - Play videos back-to-back, display an 'Up Next' indicator, and loop content.
Social share - Let viewers share videos via email or embed codes, with options to start playback at a specific position.
