Can we stream a BrightCove video to our own HTML5 player?

Question

We want to deliver BrightCove videos to an HTML player, autoplaying and muted. But the API only allows programmatic muting of videos in the Flash player. (BrightCove support says "Setting the audio volume of a video programmatically requires the use of the Flash-only Player API.")

I've tried copying the URL in the Quick Video Publish form for a video

But that just gets me a Flash player.

To get round this I'm wondering if it's possible to serve BrightCove videos to an HTML5 player we build ourselves? Do customers always have to use their players?

Answer 1

Yes, it looks like you can play it. Plz check this link.

http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forums/jw-player/setup-issues-and-embedding/8001/can-brightcove-vids-be-viewed-using-jw-flv-player/

Answer 2

BrightCove does seem to provide a URL for people who want to stream their files to their own player. If you find the video in the Media tab of the VideoCloud dashboard and click the Edit button at the bottom, you get the video details. On the Video Files tab of the details popup you'll see this bit:

which gives you a URL like http://video.sdd.co.uk/videos/32439484001/2014/04/3212312384001_34399456453001_20140407-username-tightrope-Brightcove16x9.mp4. When you enter the URL in your browser address bar the video plays, and you can use it as the src of an html5 video tag.

Two things to note: BrightCove warns that this URL is liable to change occasionally - they advise you to grab it using their API instead of hard-coding it. Details here. Also, a video tag with the URL as the src will probably not work in Firefox, which doesn't properly support MP4 videos - when you use one of the official BrightCove embeds it does work, so BrightCove probably have some workaround.