lychee_player 1.0.0-beta.3

A cross-platform media player for Flutter, built on a reusable C/C++ core with hardware decoding.

lychee_player

A video and audio player for Flutter with hardware decoding, on a reusable C/C++ core: VideoToolbox on macOS and iOS, MediaCodec on Android, Media Foundation and D3D11VA on Windows, VAAPI on Linux, and an LGPL-only FFmpeg for everything else. Frames reach Flutter as textures without a copy where the platform allows.

import 'package:lychee_player/lychee_player.dart';

final player = await LycheePlayer.create();
player.open('https://example.com/video.mp4');
player.play();

// In a widget tree; rebuilds as the player's value changes.
LycheeVideo(player);

// player.value: state, position, duration, tracks, subtitle, ...
// player.seek(), setRate(), setVolume(), setLooping(), selectTrack()
player.dispose();

Platforms

Platform	Minimum	Set in your app
Android	API 26, 64-bit	minSdk = 26 and the ABIs below in android/app/build.gradle.kts
iOS	16.0	platform :ios, '16.0' in ios/Podfile and the Runner's deployment target
macOS	11.0	platform :osx, '11.0' in macos/Podfile and the Runner's deployment target
Windows	10	Visual Studio 2022
Linux	Ubuntu 22.04	libepoxy-dev and libpulse-dev to build; at run time FFmpeg loads the system's libva2, libva-drm2, libdrm2, libgnutls30 and zlib1g

Hardware decoding: VideoToolbox, MediaCodec, Media Foundation and D3D11VA have been seen working, and VAAPI on Linux with an Intel GPU.

The Android core is built for arm64-v8a and x86_64 only. Otherwise Flutter also packs a 32-bit engine, and on a 32-bit device (or a 64-bit one running a 32-bit system, as some TV boxes do) the app starts but LycheePlayer.create() throws. In defaultConfig (the Flutter Gradle plugin has set its own list there already):

if (project.findProperty("split-per-abi") != "true") {
    ndk {
        abiFilters.clear()
        abiFilters += listOf("arm64-v8a", "x86_64")
    }
}

Split APKs use a separate ABI configuration, which cannot be combined with ndk.abiFilters. Select the supported targets on the command line:

flutter build apk --split-per-abi --target-platform=android-arm64,android-x64

On macOS, Flutter's template runs the app in the App Sandbox: add com.apple.security.network.client to both entitlements files to play URLs, and open local files the user picked (file_selector) or that live in the app's container; other paths fail with "Operation not permitted".

On Linux with NVIDIA's driver, an app that quits while a video plays can crash in libnvidia-eglcore: Flutter's template leaves its window, and so the engine's raster thread, alive into exit(), where NVIDIA's EGL tears itself down. Destroy the window in the runner's shutdown, as the example's linux/runner/my_application.cc does (keep the window from activate in the application struct).

The native core comes prebuilt for Android, iOS and macOS: the first build downloads it from this version's GitHub release into ~/.cache/lychee_player and checks each file against the SHA-256 the package pins. Where GitHub is slow or blocked, point LYCHEE_PREBUILT_URL at a mirror of https://github.com/boyan01/lychee_player/releases/download (the files are checked the same way). Windows and Linux compile the core with the app and download an LGPL FFmpeg from the same release, through the same mirror; LYCHEE_FFMPEG_ROOT names a local one instead. On Windows, LYCHEE_WITH_FFMPEG=OFF builds the core without FFmpeg (Media Foundation: H.264, HEVC, AAC, MP3; MP4, Matroska, MPEG-TS and HLS), and the app ships no FFmpeg DLLs.

License

MIT. The FFmpeg libraries it ships are LGPL and dynamically linked. core/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES in this package describes their sources and builds by platform: all use this project's builds, with source attached to each release. An app must include the notices for the libraries it ships. The prebuilt core carries this project's notice into apps (lychee.framework, and META-INF/lychee/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES in Android APKs).

Source, roadmap and the native SDKs (Swift, Kotlin, Rust): https://github.com/boyan01/lychee_player