[Pro] Here’s what to do if you want to play movies with ‘JWPlayer’ on your pages

Freeway
1

Here’s what to do if you want to play movies with ‘JWPlayer’ on your pages.

I’ve had help from people on this discussion forum and from very friendly people at Freeway. Thank you all. So this is for you people like me who don’t know enough about coding to do these ‘simple’ things.

Download and use ‘Handbrake’ to encode your videos as: H264 mp4

Go to: Learn More | JW Player

  1. Uncheck the two options (‘Keep me informed …’ and ‘Include Viral …’)
    Download the player - its in a zip file called ‘mediaplayer.zip’.
    Open the zipped folder on your desktop and leave it for a while.

  2. Go to Freeways Actions: http://www.actionsforge.com/actions
    Search for the Action ‘Upload Extra Resource’ and download it.
    On your desktop open the Action and allow it to be installed into Freeway.

  3. Open your website on the page you want to have your video.
    Go to ‘Page’ menu – select ‘HTML Markup’
    In the dialogue that opens insert this code below:
    (in the section: Before )

  1. When you have done that go to menu ‘Insert’ and select ‘Markup Item’ and paste this into the box:
This text will be replaced

You change the various options in the above code to suit what you want for your video. First of all change /replacewithnameyourvideo to the actual name of your video. You can also change the instruction after ‘controlbar’: ‘autostart’: ‘volume’: ‘repeat’: ‘width’: ‘height’:. Change them to suit your video and what you want it to do.

Have a look at the ‘Wizard’ page for JWPlayer to learn about the options:
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player-setup-wizard

  1. Select the Markup Item you have now put on the webpage. Attach the Action ‘Upload Extra Resource’ to the Markup Item.

  2. In the Action options, select the top arrow: ‘In Resources Folder’. For No. 1 select your video – wherever it is on your computer. For No. 2 select, navigate to the ‘mediaplayer’ folder you downloaded at ‘Step 1’ above. Select the file ‘jwplayer.js. For No 3 select from the same ‘mediaplayer’ folder the file ‘player.swf’.

  3. Now Preview the video playing in your Freeway page. I hope it works for you.

Inserting more than 1 video on 1 page:
If you want to play 2 videos on the same page then you need a slight change to the code at Step 4 above. Where you see the word ‘mediaspace’ (twice) change it to ‘mediaspace2’ in both places. If you have 3 videos on one page change the word to ‘mediaspace3’, etc.

Also: you only have the code for the Page in HTML Markup once on the page (besides its already there from the first time you did it).

When you attach the Action ‘Upload Extra Resource’ to the 2nd or 3rd Markup Item (for the 2nd and 3rd videos) only choose the video for ‘In Resources Folder’ (Don’t select the files ‘jwplayer.js and ‘player.swf’ – you have already choose them to be uploaded for the 1st video and you don’t need two of them).

I hope I’ve not made any mistakes in the above and they are clear instructions for you.

GT

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2

Hi GT

Have got it working but have still got a couple of problems. Firstly it takes a long time to load - http://cherokeedesigns.co.uk/_test.html
It works on my iPhone, Windows 7 with IE9 but nothing on my iPad.

Did you have any of these problems??

Regards

Lee

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3

Hi,

I think I’m right in saying it won’t work on iPad because it is a Flash player - Apple don’t use Flash on iOS.

Don’t know why it takes so long to load. What size is the video? Did you encode it with the ‘Web optimised’ button checked? According to the Handbrake ‘Help’:

‘This rearranges the header of the MP4 file to optimize it for streaming across the web’.

Maybe also choose the Format ‘MP4 File’ instead of m4v.

You could also give it some volume to start with immediately - instead of ‘volume’: ‘0’ - change the ‘0’ to higher ‘7’ or ‘8’ etc.

GT

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4

I think I’m right in saying it won’t work on iPad because it is a Flash player - Apple don’t use Flash on iOS.

I must admit that was my initial thought but I think it is supposed to use HTML5 if there is no Flash - and he did say it worked on his iPhone - but in saying that it doesn’t appear to work on my iPhone.

It is a 40Mb file so will take a while to load - is there an option when encoding such as Fast Web Start as there is in QTPro?

D

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5

The other thing that should have been glaringly obvious is the use of spaces in file names.

Your video’s file name is full of space characters and a mix of upper and lower case letters and I think that the JS is getting upset by this. Stick to lower case alphanumerics with hyphens - and underscores _ the only separators for your file names. And do try an mp4 instead.

D

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6

This is your video in my JWPlayer page http://www.deltadesign.co/fw_examples/jwplayer.html

as an mp4 with a short file name video2.mp4

D

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7

Thanks for the feedback. I was trying to get this done before I went out this morning. Obviously I didn’t have my thinking head on.

Thanks for the help

Lee

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