It is easy enough to embed Vimeo videos in your React Native app using a standard React Native Webview, however it is impossible to access the Vimeo player API that way. This component allows you to easily embed a Vimeo video in your app and have full access to the Vimeo player JS API (documented at https://developer.vimeo.com/player/js-api).

1. Go through the instructions for installing the React Native Webview Bridge component, found here: https://github.com/alinz/react-native-webview-bridge.

2. Run npm install react-native-vimeo within your project.

3. Compile and build to make sure everything is set up properly.

  <Vimeo
    ref='video'
    videoId='2619976' // Vimeo video ID
    onReady={ () => console.log('Video is ready') }
    onPlay={ () => console.log('Video is playing') }
    onPlayProgress={ data => console.log('Video progress data:', data) }
    onFinish={ () => console.log('Video is finished') }
  />

this.refs.video.api('getDuration', dur => console.log('Video duration is:', dur))

NOTE: Any api method calls must be made after onReady has been called.

Internally, a webview loads a HTML page which is hosted via Github Pages. This HTML page loads your Vimeo video in an iFrame, then uses the Froogaloop JS library provided by Vimeo to pass event information through the webview bridge to your application. Vimeo API calls are made by sending a message to the HTML page via the webview bridge.

Ideally, the HTML page content would just be passed as a string into the webview, however if that were the case then the Vimeo JS API would not function. As stated in the Vimeo JS API documentation, the Froogaloop library can only interact with the Vimeo iFrame when the page is served up by a web server, not when it is loaded locally.

If you would like to view the contents of the HTML page used, simply clone this repo and checkout the gh-pages branch (more info here https://help.github.com/articles/creating-project-pages-manually/). Alternatively, just visit http://myagi.github.io/react-native-vimeo/ and view the source.