Integrating Video Support into Your Flutter App

Adding Video Support to Your Flutter App

The popularity of video content in mobile applications is steadily increasing, and the ability to easily incorporate videos into your Flutter app can give a great boost to its user experience.

With the help of the video_player package, you can quickly and easily add video support to your Flutter app. In this article, we’ll look at how to get started with video_player and how to use it to create a basic video player application.

Installing the video_player Package

The first step in adding video support to your Flutter app is to install the video_player package. This package is available on pub.dev, and can be installed by adding the following dependency to your pubspec.yaml file:

dependencies:
  video_player: 

Where can be replaced with the latest version number from pub.dev.

Building the Video Player

Now that the video_player package is installed, we can begin building the video player. This involves constructing a VideoPlayer widget and configuring its various properties, such as the source URL of the video to be played, the aspect ratio of the video, and whether or not the video should be looped.

For example, to construct a VideoPlayer that plays a video from a URL with a width of 600 pixels and an aspect ratio of 16/9, we can do the following:

VideoPlayer(
  url: 'https://example.com/video.mp4',
  width: 600,
  aspectRatio: 16/9,
  looping: true,
)

Playing & Pausing Video

Once the VideoPlayer is constructed and configured, the next step is to create a mechanism for playing and pausing the video. This can be easily accomplished using the play() and pause() methods available on the VideoPlayerController class.

For example, to create a button that plays the video when clicked and pauses it when clicked again, we can use the following code:

bool _isPlaying = false;

RaisedButton(
  onPressed: () {
    setState(() {
      _isPlaying = !_isPlaying;
    });
    if (_isPlaying) {
      _controller.play();
    } else {
      _controller.pause();
    }
  },
  child: Text(_isPlaying ? "Pause" : "Play"),
),

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve looked at how to add video support to a Flutter app using the video_player package. We’ve seen how to install and configure the package, and how to create a basic video player application. With the help of this package, you can quickly and easily add video support to your Flutter app.