Today, I decided to mess around with something called “Shaka Smart”. Honestly, I’d never heard of it before, but I saw someone mention it online, and it sounded interesting. So, I figured, why not give it a shot?
What even is Shaka Smart?
First things first, I had to figure out what this thing actually was. I did a quick search, and it turns out it’s related to something called “Shaka Player” which is a JavaScript library for playing adaptive media formats, like DASH and HLS, it’s a pretty neat tool for video playback.
Based on that, I guessed “Shaka Smart” might be a way to make using Shaka Player even better for some specific use-cases.
Getting Started
My first step was to get my hands on the code. I went and find the basic example for Shaka Player. I copied the sample code, put it into my local file.
- Created a basic HTML file.
- Added a
<video>tag. - Included the Shaka Player JavaScript library.
- Wrote a small script to initialize the player and load a test video.
Experimenting
Now that I had a working example, I started to try some different things. I find the feature about text track and audio track, and added some to my code.
Realizations and Wrap-Up
After all my messing around, I can say that Shaka Smart, or at least my interpretation of it, is all about making smart decisions around video playback. It’s about picking the best quality, handling errors gracefully, and giving the user a smooth experience.
It’s not a single, pre-packaged thing, but rather a way of using Shaka Player and other tools effectively. I’ve definitely learned something today, and I’ll probably keep playing around with this stuff to see what else I can do.
