FLV Media Player

published on Jul 11th, 2009

 

The ExpressionEngine FLV player plug-in allows you to use the JW FLV Media Player (built with Adobe's Flash) as an easy and flexible way to add video and audio to your website.

Features

This plugin manages the JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 4+ and makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your ExpressionEngine posts and pages.

The FLV Player Plugin supports streaming video format ( .flv or .swf), sound files as MP3 and JPG, GIF or PNG grafic files.

Download

Installation

Unzip and upload plug-in into your plugins directory overwriting previous version if present.
Backup previous version if present already.
Copy the file ‘player.swf’ to your server. Copy the file ‘yt.swf if you intend using youTube videos.

SWFObject

This plugin uses version 2 of the freely available javascript, SWFObject, for embedding Flash.

SWFObject if you haven’t come across it before is a Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script.

SWFObject is a small Javascript file used for embedding Macromedia Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.*

To use it, first upload the swfobject.js to your server and include it in the head section of your website:
Also upload expressInstall.swf in the same place as the javascript

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.somesite.com/scripts/swfobject.js"></script> 

Note that if you have version 1.5 of SWFobject already installed it will not work with this version (4) of the plug-in.

Configuration

Skinning

For JW Player (4.0 and higher) skinning is available. You can download ready made skins here.
They can also be easily created in Flash. For more information on how to build a skin, check here.

Plugin Parameters

All supported parameters (flashvars) you can set to customise the player can be found in the plug-in info found in ExpressionEngine’s control panel or here

SWFObject properties

  • wmode (opaque):Possible values: window, opaque, transparent. .
  • allowfullscreen (true):Allows fullscreen viewing. Flash Player ver 9 and above .
  • allowscriptaccess (always): For the protectection of HTML pages from untrusted SWF files
  • bgcolor (CCCCCC): [ hexadecimal RGB value] in the format RRGGBB . Specifies the background color of the Flash Object. Default is grey #CCCCCC
  • flashversion (9.0.0): Flash version number
  • playernumber (undefined): unique number which should match flash content layer ID

Examples

Single Entry Example

{exp:flvplugin playerpath="player.swf" file="{custom_video_field}" playernumber="{entry_id}" screencolor="151d4a" width="400" height="302"}
<div id="player{entry_id}"></div> 

YouTube Example

{exp:flvplugin playerpath="player.swf" file="http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D{youtube_id}"  playernumber="{entry_id}" width="400" height="302" skin="overlay.swf"  frontcolor="ffffff" lightcolor="cc9900" controlbar="over" icons="false" wmode="transparent" image="video-default.png"}
<div id="player{entry_id}"></div> 

Playlist Example

{exp:flvplugin playerpath="player.swf" file="http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/recently_featured" playlist="bottom" playernumber="1" width="470" height="470" skin="overlay.swf"  frontcolor="ffffff" lightcolor="cc9900" icons="false" controlbar="over" stretching="fill"} 

Tutorial

Check out our tutorial for creating customised playlists in ExpressionEngine

Support

You can find support at this thread on the ExpressionEngine forums

Changelog

  • Version 4.5.0
    Plugin functionality (through flashvars and loadPlugin call) - Accessibility (captions + audiodesc) plugin - More feed parsing (date, tags & wildcards) - Arthropod support (arthropod.stopp.se) - 'Icons' flashvar - RTMP port fallbacks - Dock plugin - Print title over the display
  • Version 4.0.0
    Uses version 2.1 of SWF object
  • Version 3.0.0
    new
  • Version 2.5.0
    Plugin updated to be used with original player version 3.5
  • Version 2.2.0
    Player now validates as per W3C
  • Version 2.1.0
    Updated checking of empty variables
  • Version 2.0.0
    Updated plugin to work with FLVPlayer 3.1
 
 


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