OT: New JW Flash/media player and setup wizard.

Laurence wrote on 8/20/2008, 7:13 AM

The new http://www.jeroenwijering.com/JW Player[/link] looks incredibly cool. It will do Flash as well as various other sorts of media.

They also have a separate Silverlight player.

There is even a cool setup wizard utility http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?page=wizardhere[/link] which will guide you through all the settings.

My problem is that while the video looks great on the setup wizard page, the embedded code it generates isn't working on my web pages. Instead of the movie, I just get a line of text reading "This text will be replaced".

I looked through their forum and saw that I am not the only one with this problem, but no answers, at least none that I could understand. Does anyone have an idea of what I might be doing wrong?

Comments

MilesCrew wrote on 8/20/2008, 8:34 AM

I use this on my blog alot. Wonderful little dude.

Your problem sounds like when it cannot find the swfobject.js Javascript file. Then the <div> tag does not actually get replaced. You need to make sure your .js file is in the right place as the setup wizard tells it that it's in an "embed" directory off the root site. Same goes for the player.swf file.

Laurence wrote on 8/20/2008, 12:56 PM

OK, now I get it. I put the player in an directory called "embed" on the root directory of my site. When I previewed the html code from Coffee Cup, I still got the "this text will be replaced" message, but as soon as I uploaded the html to the site it worked perfectly.

This is definitely the best way I've seen yet to embed a player if you are not using a video hosting site like Youtube or Vimeo.

Thanks for your help. I was stumped.

MilesCrew wrote on 8/21/2008, 6:59 AM

You're quite welcome. I agree...it's the best I've seen for self-hosting videos. And he seems to keep it updated often and well. I think the new version is even skinnable as well (although I haven't looked into it).