How I Built a Professional Course Preview Player in React With Cloudinary Video

Have you ever clicked on a video and a black rectangle is staring back at you? No thumbnail, no controls, just emptiness. That’s the default HTML5 experience, and it makes your content feel unfinished before the user even presses play. In this guide, we’ll fix that. You’ll build a full course catalog where every card shows a smart-cropped thumbnail derived directly from the video and opens a…