JW Media Player 3.16

The JW FLV Media Player (built with Adobe's Flash) is an easy and flexible way to add video and audio to your website. It supports playback of any format the Adobe Flash Player can handle (FLV, but also MP3, H264, SWF, JPG, PNG and GIF). It also supports RTMP and HTTP (Lighttpd) streaming, RSS, XSPF and ASX playlists, a wide range of flashvars (variables), an extensive javascript API and accessibility features.

Documentation

The easiest way to get going with the FLV Media Player is by using the setup wizard. Select an example, set the file you want to play and copy-paste the embed code to your site! If you want to learn more, here's the complete documentation of the FLV Media 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. 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 actionscripting yourself, you should find that changing or adding to the player/rotator is quite simple. To get started, I've provided a PDF with clear overview of the application structure.

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.

  • If you get strange display errors on IE (e.g. after refreshing), the Stage size is not properly set. Use the flashvars width and height to fix this problem.
  • Note that javascript interaction and playing remote files will not work when testing locally. These are security restrictions.
  • When entering an RTMP stream, set the stream path (rtmp://myserver.com/streams/") to the file flashvar and the actual FLV (my-great-movie) to the id flashvar. Discard the .flv extension.
  • 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!
  • 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.
  • 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/.
  • 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).
  • The player/rotator will run quite OK inside the Flash Player 7. However, the following features are not supported: display of GIF/PNG images, smoothing of scaled images/video, VP6 and H264 encoded video, javascripting and the digits in the controlbar.