How to implement preview thumbnails in THEOplayer

This article describes how to enable preview thumbnails. In THEOplayer this is done with the TextTrack API (see Availability per SDK for documentation).

SDKs
Code examples

SDKs

Web SDK	Android SDK	iOS SDK	tvOS SDK	Android TV SDK	Chromecast SDK
Yes	Yes

A demo/example of the preview thumbnails on the THEOplayer Web SDK can be found at http://demo.theoplayer.com/preview-thumbnails

Code examples

The thumbnails are loaded as a separate text track, by setting it as a sideloaded textTrack in the SourceDescription:

Web SDK

player.source = {
    sources: {
        type : 'application/x-mpegurl',
        src: 'https://cdn.theoplayer.com/video/big_buck_bunny/big_buck_bunny.m3u8'
    },
    textTracks: [{
        default: true,
        src: 'https://cdn.theoplayer.com/dash/theoplayer/thumbnails/big_buck_bunny_thumbnails.vtt',
        label: 'thumbnails',
        kind: 'metadata'
    }]

Android SDK

You can add/edit your SourceDescription as follows

public static final SourceDescription BBB_WITH_THUMBNAILS =
    new SourceDescription.Builder("https://cdn.theoplayer.com/video/big_buck_bunny/big_buck_bunny.m3u8")
        .textTracks(new TextTrackDescription.Builder("https://cdn.theoplayer.com/dash/theoplayer/thumbnails/big_buck_bunny_thumbnails.vtt")
            .isDefault(true)
            .kind(TextTrackKind.METADATA)
            .srclang("en")
            .label("thumbnails")
            .build()
    ).build();

iOS/tvOS SDK and Legacy iOS/tvOS SDK (4.12.x)

You can edit or add the SourceDescription below.

player.source = SourceDescription(
    source: TypedSource(
        src: "https://cdn.theoplayer.com/video/big_buck_bunny/big_buck_bunny.m3u8",
        type: "application/x-mpegurl"
    ),
    textTracks: [TextTrackDescription(
        src: "https://cdn.theoplayer.com/dash/theoplayer/thumbnails/big_buck_bunny_thumbnails.vtt",
        srclang: "en",
        isDefault: true,
        kind: TextTrackKind.metadata,
        label: "thumbnails")
    ]
)

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