Show Video in Gatsby from Remote Participants with React Hooks

Instructor: [00:01] To show video from remote participants, we need to add a little bit more to our custom hook. Inside our hook, we're going to look for the used Twilio video hook and then before connect a room, let's add a function called handleRemoteParticipant. This is going to take two arguments, a container and the participant.

[00:22] Inside this function, we want to first grab out an ID and every participant and really, everything that Twilio create is going to come back with an SID. That's their unique identifier for different resources.

[00:36] Next, let's create a div for our remote participant to live in. Again, remember, we're working with the ref so this needs to be actual DOM elements, not React components. This element is going to be a document.createElement and we'll send in a div. Then, we'll give it an ID of the participant ID.

[00:59] For styling, we'll give it a class name of remote participant. Next, we want to set up the name. We want to show who is in the room. We'll do document.createElement and we'll use a heading level four for this. We're going to set the inner text to the participant identity.

[01:19] This is going to be whatever they use as their name, similar to what we're passing around for our local identity. This is what the remote participant has passed in for their identity. It's just going to show their display name. Once we've got the name created, we're going to put it inside of our participant div.

[01:37] Next, we need a way to add the participant tracks to the screen. With the name inside of the participant div, we can go ahead and just attach that to our outside container. We'll stick it into a container appendChild and put in our participant div.

[01:52] Next, we need a way to add media tracks, both a video and audio. We're going to create a helper function called add track, which will accept a track. Inside of it, we want to find our participant container, which we'll call participant div. We'll get that by running document get element by ID and using the ID that we set up here. That lets us get this particular participants container div.

[02:16] We also want to grab the media, which we get by running track.attach, which gives us the DOM element for either the video or audio that are trying to attach. Then, we want to actually attach it. We will run participantDiv.appendChild and put the media inside of it.

[02:36] To use this function, we're going to go into the participant and that participant object is going to have tracks attached to it. We'll run a for each and a bit misleadingly, Twilio doesn't doesn't us back a straight track. It gives us something called a publication.

[02:50] Each publication has a boolean, so publication.isSubscribed. That lets us know whether or not our particular track should be in this room. If so, we'll call add track using the publication.track.

[03:04] However, that's only for people who have already joined when we join the room. The other thing that we need to do is add a listener for anytime that a track is subscribed. Twilio does this with eventListener. Participant on track subscribed, we'll just run add track.

[03:23] To actually use this, we'll go into our connect a room function and below where we add the local track, we will set up a helper function called handleParticipant. That will get our participant and then it will call handleRemoteParticipant with the video ref.current. Our current ref and then the participant.

[03:46] Once we've got that, we can check for existing participants. These are the people who are already joined when we join the room. We want to loop through each one and handleParticipant. For anyone who joined afterward, we'll have an event so room on participant connected, we want to handle that participant.

[04:06] To check this, we're going to have to open two windows. We start by joining a room here. I'll join Jason and egghead and join the video chat. It turns on my webcam and I can see it, but I'm not able to join this room twice.

[04:19] What I'll do is open an additional tab and we'll visit localhost. I'll just copy/paste this localhost room egghead and I'm going to use a different name then join. I'll screen my name. Now I want to be mute and that will prevent the echo. I've muted the site to prevent any echo.

[04:39] Now, we can see that in this room where I've joined as Jason, I can see the not Jason video. In this room where I've joined as not Jason, I can see the Jason video. We can see a little bit of delay if we look when I move where the remote video is just slightly behind the local video. That's our indication that it's working.