Playing videos on your website with JW Player

[brenda]

I haven't seen any discussion of this product on the community forum and thought I would pass along my experiences in case anyone else wanted to play videos directly on their website (instead of embedding a YouTube video).

In 2009 I purchased a the JW Player from Longtail Video to show videos on my website. As you may know if you tried to run a video directly from you website, you can't -- unless you have a player residing on your server. Adobe had a product that was cost prohibitive. I found Longtail on the internet and its JW Player had good reviews.

I originally bought version 4.x in 2009. I used it to run the automatic video that loads when someone lands on my home page. I started having trouble with my Alpine Ducks video (produced with Elements 9 and exported to Flash 8) buffering too often, a problem that got more pronounced when Adobe upgraded Flash a few months ago. I did some internet research and learned that Flash now has a number of negatives (including inability to display on Apple ipads), and that Quicktime H.264 files are surpassing Flash as the web format of choice. The Longtail website said that their new JWPlayer 5 series runs both formats, so I upgraded to the 5.5 player. I really like it. I'm still exporting to Flash 8, but they play much smoother with the new player.

If you want to look at my website to compare, the Alpine Ducks video on my home page is still running on the 4 series player, but my Videos page (www.brendagrantland.com/Videos/) is running on JW Player 5.

The player has to get its instructions from javascript embedded in your web page. Getting the javascript to load the player is a bit tricky. The Longtail website has lots of examples and forums, but their instructions aren't always clear and sometimes they are contradictory or incomplete. But once you get it working once on your website, you can replicate the javascript to add additional videos. The player is very versatile and has playlists and many varieties of "skins" as well as numerous useful add-ons. It wasn't very expensive (I believe about $150 originally - for a license that lasts forever) and when I upgraded they gave me the license for the JW Player 5 for half the original price.

As a test, last night I uploaded the video I'm now running on my video page to YouTube. My website and the JW Player beats YouTube hands down. When I uploaded the video to YouTube in 640X480 format YouTube down-res'd it or something, because it's much smaller. It runs at full 640X480 on my site, which is important because the viewer needs to read text on the page. When I was watching it last night the YouTube video stopped to buffer frequently. That might have been because of the number of people on YouTube at the time, but that didn't happen on my own site. Worst of all, YouTube arbitrarily picked three different frames from the video which it allowed me to choose from for the thumbnail image at the beginning. They were all terrible. I picked the least objectionable of the three. Of course on my own site I could use any image I wanted. I used Elements to capture the title once it completely loaded and saved the one frame as a jpg. The javascript code for the page tells the player which thumbnail image to use.

If you want to compare for yourself, here's the YouTube URL: http://www.youtube.com/user/FEARFoundation
Here's the URL to the same video on my website: http://www.brendagrantland.com/Videos/

So, though I was lukewarm in my opinion about JW Player 4 (mostly because of the problems I encountered, which might have been my fault - who knows?), I love JW Player 5. I'm going to add a lot of videos to my site now.

YouTube still has its advantages because other YouTube visitors can find your videos through the search function, but if you want your website to have classy video, embedding a YouTube video on it is not nearly as impressive.

Brenda

[Chuck Engels]

Thanks for the great info Brenda
JW Player is a very versatile tool for playing videos on your web site.
A good friend of mine has used JW Player for quite some time now and really loves it.
He uses JW Player to stream live audio from his church clients to their web sites on Sunday Mornings, very impressive.

[Jayell]

Good info, Brenda. I've been running 4.3xxx without much trouble, but good to know the next version is even better.