JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 4.0

The LongTail Video Desktop Player is a standalone application that plays any FLV right on your desktop. Free download!

Installation

This section describes a very simple installation. The download ZIP contains all you need to get started. First, transfer the player.swf and swfobject.js file from the ZIP to your website. Also upload all videos/songs/images you want to show to your site.

Second, embed the player in your HTML page with these lines of code. If you place the files in different directories, make sure to set the references in this code accordingly:

<p id='preview'>The player will show in this paragraph</p>

<script type='text/javascript' src='swfobject.js'></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var s1 = new SWFObject('player.swf','player','400','300','9');
s1.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
s1.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');
s1.addParam('flashvars','file=video.flv');
s1.write('preview');
</script>

The flashvars parameter can contain a list of variables for configuring the player. To quickly get the ones you want, use the setup wizard. Select an example, set the variables you want and copy-paste the code to your page. That's all!

Documentation

All documentation of the JW Player can be found at the JW Player Wiki. It also includes the roadmap, source code and bug tickets. A couple of direct links are here:

1. All supported flashvars (variables) you can set to customize the player.
2. All file, playlist and captioning formats you can use, plus some implementation info.
3. A complete overview of the javascript API included with the player.
4. An overview of all skinneable elements plus info on how to create a skin.

If you find a CMS module that embeds the player in existing CMS systems, please report!

Also make sure to check out the various tutorials on this site, including the ones on:

1. Embedding a flash object in your site (which covers the simple embed method and the SWF Object method).
2. Converting your video to FLV.
3. Adding accessibility features (closed captions and an audio description) to the player.

Support

I receive a lot of requests for creating customized versions of my player/rotator. In most cases however, a clever setting of the flashvars already fulfilled the requests, so please make sure you first check the list of flashvars or the setup wizard. Additionally, I do not design or program any particular (paid-for) customizations (I just don't have time for it), but interesting features will be plugged into the next update.

If you are familiar with actionscript (3) yourself, you should find that changing or adding to the player is quite simple. To get started, I've provided a PDF with clear overview of the application structure. All source code can also be checked out from the Wiki.

Here's a list with some frequently-encountered problems. For tips, tricks, additional info and bug reports, you can always have a look at my support forum.

1. Javascript interaction and playing remote files will not work when testing locally. These are security restrictions. Also note that javascript interaction doesn't work for SWF files inside a <form> tag.
2. True fullscreen only works if you have the Flash Player 9,0,28,0 or higher installed. H264 video only works from version 9.0.98. If you use the SWFObject javascript to embed your player, you can use it's auto-update functionality. Also make sure you have the parameter allowfullscreen set to true in your embed code!
3. If your MP4 files cannot be seeked before they are completely downloaded, the so-called MOOV atom (which contains the seeking information) is located at the end of your video. Check out this little application to parse your videos and fix it.
4. If you encounter too fast or too slow playback of MP3 files, it contains variable bitrate encoding or unsupported sample frequencies (eg 48Khz). Please stick to constant bitrate encoding and 11,22,33,44 kHz. The free iTunes software has a decent MP3 encoder.
5. If the progressbar isn't running with your FLV file, or if your video dimensions are wrong, your FLV file doesn't have metadata. Fix this by using the small tool from www.buraks.com/flvmdi/.
6. If FLV playback doesn't work on your site which runs off an IIS server, the FLV mimetype isn't added to the server. Please contact your webserver administrator on this (if you're an admin, here's how to fix it).