Switching from QuickTime to JW FLV Player

Awhile back I enabled mediabox where if you clicked on a resolution from our main catalog, it’ll pop out a video player on top of our page instead of launching the video directly. The problem with that was the object was embedded with QuickTime and you know how much I hate QuickTime.

I was messing around with JW FLV Player and remembered that it was able to play H.264/MP4 files. The idea of trying to use it to play QuickTime/MOV files popped into my head and after testing a bit, it was a success! Took me some time to figure out how to escape an url for FlashVars. Turns out you’ll have to urlencode the following 3 symbols: = ? &

Then I had to remember how to modify mediabox to get it to stop using the QuickTime embedding code and to switch to the SWFObject code I wanted to use. After getting that to work, I realized mediabox has evoled into mediaboxadvanced and was now much cooler. It now has rounded edges and even supports sets of media so you can browse between them w/o having to leave the player. One of these days, I may consider linking up all the trailers or maybe the current top 10. But for now, I’ve linked up all the trailers/clips of the same movie and of the same resolution.

Switching over to the new mediaboxadvanced was pretty straightforward. Took a few tries to figure out which set of MooTools I needed, but once I had my sample page working, it was only updating my scripts to point to the newer versions and a 2 line change to add support to sets and to change mediabox to lightbox. I’ve also enhanced the title to show not only the movie name, but the clip name as well as the resolution.

I’ve tested it out on Firefox and IE8 and they both seem to work fine. Let me know if you hit into any issues.

Too bad the Apple trailer links are still broken unless you change your browser’s User Agent to Quicktime, or this update would’ve been that much cooler.

7 thoughts on “Switching from QuickTime to JW FLV Player

  1. @Stryker412: Stuttering because it’s buffering? or stuttering because your computer is having problems playing the video in flash smoothly? Previously it would try to play immediately and would stop and wait for more data to come in. Yesterday, I configured it to have a 20sec buffer before it’ll start to play.

    If it’s a buffering issue (which I suspect), it’s easily resolvable if you pause the trailer, let it buffer some more, then play again. I may play around with the buffering some more to make it a better experience.

    If it’s a computer resource/performance problem, for now you can always middle click, shift+click, ctrl+click to get it to open in a new tab/window, bypassing the javascript and launching it inside QuickTime. If I hear more feedback of JW Player being an issue, I’ll reconsider switching back.

  2. @Krunk

    Thanks.

    I cannot see the differences, but then again I am really new to this.

    I was able to save your copy to my server, and made the changes (player etc) – it works.

    I really appreciate the help

    Thanks again.

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