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Player Web X is still in active development and the information presented here is therefore subject to change. To stay up to date on what has changed, please refer to our Release Notes.

A word from our engineers

Player Web X (PWX for short) is a new video player for the web that we at Bitmovin developed. It is based on an in-house developed library that we call the Phoenix Framework.

The Phoenix Framework is built from the ground up with fundamentals such as structured concurrency, an effect system and a package first architecture in mind that facilitates extensibility. Player Web X is built on a state-driven architecture that is built on top of the framework. Player Web X is developed with focus on making a highly performant player, with different, smaller and purpose built bundles comprised of different packages, as well as a Package API. Package API allows custom behaviours and functionalities to be built externally to the player, enabling our customers to support their own use cases without ever needing our help.

If you want to learn more about why we decided to built a new player that is built on top of a new framework, check out our blog posts about Player Web X and the journey that brought us to where we're at today:

1. Why Structured Concurrency Matters for Developers
2. Developing a Video Player with Structured Concurrency
3. Player Web X – A New Player for a New Era

Currently, Player Web X has support for HLS streams that use the fMP4 and TS segment formats and partial support for DASH streams and muxed content. For a more detailed and complete listing of supported features, please refer to the Support Matrix.

If the features listed in the support matrix serve your needs, you can give Player Web X a try today. Just sign up for either Player or Streams, and if you just want to kick the tyres, don't worry, we offer a fully featured trial account - no credit card needed.

Once you have a licence key, all you need to do is to include the player in your web application and run it. Take a look at the Getting started guide for a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to do that.

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This documentation is still under active development and doesn't yet include an API documentation.

Instead you can find Player Web X's preliminary API documentation on our CDN.

Why this player is different

Player Web X is more than just a player - it is a playback platform. Built on top of the Phoenix Framework with its packaging system, structured concurrency implementation and dependency injection approach, Player Web X is backed and supported by Bitmovin, one of the industry leading companies in the field of online video streaming. Having all these combined, we aim at offering unprecedented flexibility and extensibility for a closed-source product.

Instead of defining fixed interfaces that can only be used to extend certain predefined functionalities of the player and hiding our internal implementations by default, Player Web X, utilising the packaging system, exposes most internal states and components openly to be used by other packages.

This enables you to create your own packages which can extend, replace or remove existing functionality, and - most importantly - to add completely new functionalities and features directly inside of the player.

If you are interested to learn more about the advanced features of the Phoenix Framework and the player, and creating one of your own bundles or packages, please refer to the Features and Create integrations with Packages sections.