And the winner is…
by Yael Katz on 2013-05-15 15:42
Thanks to everyone who completed our survey. We received 3,000 responses! Input from our users is extremely helpful to us as we work to make JW Player better and better.
Congratulations to Steve from Little Art Web on winning the iPad. We hope you enjoy it :)
New in JW Player: Responsive Design
by Yael Katz on 2013-05-03 16:41
With sales of mobile devices now outpacing those of desktop PCs, web designers face a challenge: how to best present content across all these devices. Smartphone screens average around 4” diagonally, tablets are 7" to 10", laptops average around 14" and desktop monitors go up to 30" these days. All these different devices result in screens of varying shapes and sizes. This presents a challenge when laying out a page - how to provide a viewing experience that looks good on every screen. One solution is responsive design.
What is Responsive Design?
The best way to understand responsive design is to look at what happens when a page is not responsive:
As you can see, when design is not responsive, when you resize your screen, in this case the browser window, the page elements do not resize as well. The traditional way around this is to create multiple sites, one for the desktop, one for a smartphone, etc. This is not ideal, both from the point of view of the designer/developer and the end user experience.
Responsive Web Design is an approach to creating a website that dynamically adapts itself to the size of the screen on which it is being displayed. Whether you are on a tablet, smartphone or desktop, responsive pages rearrange and resize content to provide the optimal viewing experience. If you are interested in looking at a few responsive design examples, we highly recommend checking out this blog.
The Challenge with Responsive Video
While text can easily be manipulated in a responsive design, embedded video has remained a challenge. Unlike the HTML5 <video> tag, which can be scaled responsively by setting max-width:100% and height:auto, embedded players like YouTube, Vimeo and JW Player don’t scale automatically. This is mainly because their embeds contain a fixed width and height in pixels. Responsive designs lay out page elements through relative units, such as percentages, rather than pixels. To properly make a player responsive, it is important that the aspect ratio of the video be maintained by also scaling the height according to this ratio.
To be honest, it is possible to make embedded players such as earlier versions of JW6 responsive by using various CSS hacks. For instance, Elastic Videos uses iframes where the source is 100x100 pixels. FitVids is a jquery plugin that uses additional javascript libraries to achieve responsive design. As you can imagine, these are not the most elegant solutions, nor are they scalable.
Because responsive design is a current web trend used by a lot of sites, we have received many feature requests for JW Player to support it. We wanted to provide a setable option within the player to make it responsive, rather than merely a set of instructions to use JW Player with one of the existing hacks. This was a challenge because JW Player is used on so many sites across both Flash and HTML5 modes, that we had to avoid potential CSS clashes (conflicts between the CSS in the player and the existing CSS on the page).
Introducing JW Player Responsive Design
With the release of JW Player 6.4, we introduced native support for responsive design. To get started, all you have to do is set the player width to a percentage, and indicate the video’s aspect ratio. The player will automatically resize its height accordingly. Here is an example setup:
Click resize to scale the video responsively:
JW Player Setup Code
The responsive player setup options for this demo are displayed below. To learn more about embedding JW Player, check out our support documentation.
jwplayer("myResponsiveVideo").setup({
file: "/assets/tearsofsteel.mp4",
image: "/assets/tearsofsteel.jpg",
width: "100%",
aspectratio: "12:5"
});
WordPress Setup Options
Our WordPress Plugin version 2.1 makes it even easier to setup JW Player with Responsive design. In the JW Player management section, simply set the player dimensions to responsive:
Check out this demo to test out a responsive vs a non-responsive JW Player. If you have questions on this functionality, or ideas for future updates, please let us know!
The State of HTML5 Video - Q1 2013
by Ed Wolf on 2013-04-23 20:59
It’s been a busy first quarter for 2013! Already this year we have seen Microsoft's foray into tablet with their Surface, and BlackBerry’s release of their long-awaited BB10 phone. To coincide with the latest update of our State of HTML5 Video Report, we’ll explore a couple of industry changes impacting the world of online video.
Market Share Changes
Since our last report in January, we’ve seen a stabilisation in market share for mobile browsers, which remains around 15%. On the desktop side, now that Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 has finally been released, there’s a good chance IE9/10’s share will surpass that of Firefox over the next couple of months:
FireFox Gains MP4 Support
It should also be noted that Mozilla has implemented preliminary support for MP4 playback in FireFox. While this functionality is targeted to ship with FireFox 21 later this May, it is currently available for Windows users via their nightly builds. The addition will make MP4 support ubiquitous across all major desktop browsers. We’ll keep an eye out to see if this helps FireFox regain some of its lost market share. Overall it is a step in the right direction for Mozilla, which now makes embedding video content less cumbersome across browsers.
Opera Moves to Webkit
Other significant news this quarter came from Opera, who announced that they will be moving from their own Presto rendering engine to WebKit. In part, this move may have been a result of web designers writing webkit-only mobile sites. Earlier this March, a beta for Opera on Android using WebKit was released, and has mostly positive reviews. As long as Opera is able to deliver features unmatched by their rivals, they should be good to go.
Text Tracks in Chrome for Android
The latest release of the Chrome (v25) for Android 4.0 devices adds new functionality, including support for the <track> element. While testing this, we did come across a few issues. First, this preliminary implementation does not work visually. It causes playback to become garbled and makes the controls unstable. Second, there is no option to enable captions while the player is in fullscreen. Below screenshot is an example of inline playback with captions enabled. As you can see, they are not rendering correctly:
Internet Explorer 10 Improvements
In our last update, Internet Explorer 10 had just been released alongside Windows 8. Since then, the browser has been released for Windows 7, and has gained a market share of some 5%. While IE 10 brings speed enhancements to startup and page rendering times, the biggest improvement is its expanded support for HTML5 and CSS3. In our HTML5 Video tests, we've seen new support for video tracks and VTT captions, plus fixes around video preloading and poster image rendering.
WHOISJW: Free To Watch Documentary
by Yael Katz on 2013-04-02 04:05
We’re pleased to hear the documentary about Jeroen and the JW Player is now free to watch! Here’s the announcement from its creators, PictureThis.tv:WHOISJW? The Best Kept Secret Online
A Source of Inspiration for Ambitious Young People
WHOISJW? is a documentary about a very talented and successful young entrepreneur from Holland: Jeroen Wijering. What started as a simple educational project from a Dutch Design Academy Student rapidly turned out into a web phenomenon; the JW Player.
Nowadays his brainchild is used by millions of people to watch videos on the internet without them even realizing it. Many prestigious websites like Disney, Harvard, IMDB, Intel, NASA en The White House use his JW Player. Even YouTube ran on the JW Player in the first year of their existence.
WHOISJW? is made by PictureThis.tv, a video production company from The Netherlands. Director Eelco Romeijn and Producer Marco van der Ploeg see the story behind Jeroen Wijering and his JW Player as a unique story that needs to be told. They invested in creating this documentary as independent filmmakers and followed Jeroen Wijering for over two years in The Netherlands and in the U.S.A. before finalizing it.
Introducing JW Player 6 for WordPress
by Jeroen Wijering on 2013-03-13 17:18
With over 400,000 downloads and counting, the JW Player for WordPress Plugin is an extremely popular way that our publishers go live. We are now proud to announce the general availability of our WordPress plugin for JW Player 6, as part of the plugin’s 2.0 update. We are excited to have our WordPress users upgrade to our newest major JW Player version - JW Player 6.
Read about what’s new in our WordPress plugin for JW6 and then visit our Getting Started Guide to get JW Player 6 up and running on your WordPress blog.
What's New
There’s quite a bit of new functionality in our WordPress Plugin 2.0 update, mostly centered around JW Player 6:
- First and foremost - there is JW6 itself, with its slick new skin and mobile-optimized interface. JW6 also supports many of the newer HTML5 capabilities, like subtle CSS3 animations and HTML5 Fullscreen support.
- Second, we changed the way you install JW Player. Instead of requiring you to download/upload it, you simply load JW Player from our CDN. Player updates are included with updates of the WordPress plugin itself, and the player is now cloud-hosted.
- Last, we added full support for all features in the commercial Pro, Premium and Ads editions of JW Player 6. This includes setting your own player logo (Pro), loading skins or playing HLS streams (Premium) and playing VAST or IMA pre-roll ads (Ads).
Please note that certain functionality is no longer supported in JW Player 6 when compared with JW5. Some of those key items are ZIP skins, SWF plugins and the playback of JPG/PNG images. Existing WordPress users should read Upgrading Your WordPress Plugin from JW5 to JW6 for more info.
Deep Integration
Our deep integration with WordPress has long separated us from other video plugins. In the plugin upgrade for JW6, we have enhanced the player's integration so you can:
- Embed videos with JW Player directly from the Media Library.
- Add external URLs, like YouTube and RTMP streams, to the Media Library.
- Create and manage multiple JW Player templates in the WordPress Admin.
- Create and publish playlists of multiple videos in the Media Library.
- Add last-minute configuration options to the [jwplayer] shortcodes.
See our WordPress Plugin Reference if you’re interested in a full overview of functionality. And note we have made sure that all of this works with the new Media Manager that was introduced in WordPress 3.5.
Get Started
We very much encourage you to install or upgrade your WordPress plugin and let us know what you think. We are always interested in feedback on items we can improve upon or extend!
One option that is definitely coming soon is an option to have JW Player scale automatically according to the width of the page. This feature will make including JW Player in a Responsive Design setup a breeze.
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