Play video from IPFS/Arweave

Playing back transcoded video from IPFS or Arweave is easy with Livepeer! The example below uses the Player’s built-in capabilities to transcode IPFS/Arweave content without any additional configuration.

IPFS is a network of nodes that allow you to read content from the network using a content identifier unique to the data you’re requesting, ensuring you are able to securely and verifiably get exactly what you are asking for, regardless of where the data is physically stored. Arweave is a set of nodes that are incentivized to store data permanently; content stored on the network is pulled through an Arweave gateway.

For rapid processing of assets that will also be archived on IPFS or Arweave, we strongly encourage either (1) uploading to Livepeer with the storage option enabled, or (2) uploading the raw file to Livepeer via useCreateAsset or the API prior to archiving on dStorage, rather than passing the IPFS / Arweave gateway URL. The gateway URL will work, but may incur longer-than-usual processing time.

To see a complete example of using dStorage playback in React, see our example app on Github.

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Configuring Providers

We create a new React client and wrap the app with LivepeerConfig.

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Automatic Playback

Now that our providers are set up, we can add a text input for an IPFS CID or an IPFS/Arweave HTTP gateway URL.

The raw input is passed to the Player, which automatically detects if it is a valid CID and attempts to fetch the playback info for that CID. If the provider does not have an Asset with that CID, the Player will automatically attempt to upload the CID from IPFS, and then play the transcoded content back, without any additional code on the frontend. To ensure that there is no delay in playback, we recommend uploading via useCreateAsset before displaying it in the player.

import { Player } from "@livepeer/react";
import { parseArweaveTxId, parseCid } from "@livepeer/core-web/utils";

import { useMemo, useState } from "react";

export const DecentralizedStoragePlayback = () => {
  const [url, setUrl] = useState<string>("");

  const idParsed = useMemo(() => parseCid(url) ?? parseArweaveTxId(url), [url]);

  return (
    <div>
      <p>IPFS or Arweave URL</p>
      <input
        type="text"
        placeholder="ipfs://... or ar://"
        onChange={(e) => setUrl(e.target.value)}
      />

      {url && !idParsed && <p>Provided value is not a valid identifier.</p>}

      {idParsed && (
        <Player
          title={idParsed.id}
          src={url}
          autoPlay
          muted
          autoUrlUpload={{ fallback: true, ipfsGateway: "https://w3s.link" }}
        />
      )}
    </div>
  );
};