Extension talk:MediawikiPlayer

Internet Explorer 64 Bit
Just so people know, JWPlayer is not working on Internet Explorer 64 Bit. 32 Bit is fine, as are most other browsers. It's kinda like Adobe Flash, they haven't gotten around to 64 Bit browers yet.

MediawikiPayer not working
Can anyone assist. The player was working but suddenly stopped. I am not sure exactly when, so I cannot attribute the fault to anything that I have done. I am usuing the player on localhost. All I get is a blank space where the player should be. If I right click there is a message 'movie not loaded...' and 'About Adobe Flash Player'.

The player does appear to be attempting to load with the little wheel going round and round.

Cheers Ron Barker 20:39, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the above advice. I am running Windows 64-bit version and explorer 9 32 bit so I am guessing that the player does not work on windows 64 bit.

Ron Barker 21:47, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

FullScreen is Param not Variable
The script was generating the variable

s1.addVariable('allowfullscreen','true')

when it should have been generating

s1.addParam('allowfullscreen','true')

So to fix this I removed ‘allowfullscreen’ => ‘true’ from the $wgMWPlayerDefaultSettings array and hard coded it at the end

$code .= "s1.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');\n";
 * Thanks. Version 0.2.4 fixes this issue --Frantik 19:52, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Default image and any other setting known as "Flashvars"
I would like to suggest you add support for default images to your extension. All that was needed was a change to the default settings to include $wgMWPlayerDefaultSettings = array(              'width' => '400',               'height' => '300',               'allowfullscreen' => 'true',               'backcolor' => 'eeeeee',               'image' = ' ',               );

and then a command such as

http://www.yourdomain.com/mediafile.flv

can be used to set the preview image.

Thanks for the great extension.


 * You can already set the image and any other setting known as "Flashvars" listed on this page:list of flashvars You don't need to edit the extension file at all, just add the parameter to the tag. --Frantik 05:36, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
 * for example, this is perfectly valid and displays an xspf playlist

http://domain.com/playlist.xspf
 * --Frantik 05:47, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Use in Template
Is there any way to use link in a template? If I try so Mediawiki just prints it out and doesnt convert it.--Eski123 17:13, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * MW parses tags in brackets before other parts of the text, ie before tempates are transcluded. I will look into ways around this for future versions.  --Frantik 16:28, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
 * if you're running 1.12+, look into the #tag magic word: Help:Magic words
 * Hi, and thanks for the great extension. Everything worked fine, until I've tried using the  tag within a template — paragraph breaks   were showing up and messing the generated HTML code. It turns out the problem is due to MediaWiki itself. Patching the code as described here solves the problem.
 * For anybody looking to a solution, you can simply add this to your template page: --MyRobotron (talk) 17:15, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Captions from a different server
Thank you so much for this extension : very useful !

However, I'me having trouble with captions : can't manage to have them appear on a video.

Did anybody succeeded doing this ?

--Dieudo 11:46, 10 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Dieudo, see this page for more information about reading files across domains. You most likely need to set up a crossdomain.xml file.  --Frantik 10:58, 16 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you Frantik for the tip ;-)
 * However, I wonder how it could easely be set up, because for example for the first video on this page : http://fr.nvcwiki.com/index.php/Marshall_Rosenberg/bigpicture.tv I can manage to have the video but not subtitles eventhough they are here : http://fr.nvcwiki.com/images/Marshallrosenberg1.srt and I've set this file : http://fr.nvcwiki.com/images/crossdomain.xml !
 * I don't know at all what could have been done wrong :( --Dieudo 17:04, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not quite sure.. if you notice the player has a small "CC" icon so it seems like it is trying to work. Perhaps try a file with only plain ascii characters?  you may wish to ask for help on the jwplayer forums as well.  --Frantik 00:25, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the suggestion Frantik. Here it is : http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forum/Plugins/21405/Can-t-have-captions-show-within-MediaWiki
 * --Dieudo 09:06, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Some progress here :-) : http://www.dieudo.fr/w/index.php/Marshall_Rosenberg/MediawikiPlayerHTML
 * It's not using the extension, but at least it works ! --Dieudo 20:29, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I see now.. it is because mediawiki doesn't recognize captions.file as a proper argument. :( i'll see what I can do --Frantik 10:44, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

I finally succeeded in getting captions to work. As Frantik wrote, it appears to be a problem with MediaWiki -- it won't take any argument names that have a dot, underscore, or (I'm supposing) other special characters in them. So, what I did was to modify the code to check for any arguments beginning with captions and then add a. before the rest. In the wiki, I enter captionsfile="path to file" and it comes out captions.file="path to file".

The change was somewhere around line 145 in version 0.2.4 (I made a change earlier to keep MediaPlayer from overwriting the defaults if I had set them in the LocalSettings.php file, but I think that only took 2 lines). The change was to insert a one-line preg_replace statement. $name = preg_replace('/^captions(.*)$/', 'captions.${1}', $name); $newname = Xml::encodeJsVar($name); I will admit that I know close to nothing about MediaWiki or extensions, so there may be a better way. As a programmer, I know this is a terrible way. An option to wgParser that didn't strip out the dot would probably be better. However, accessibility is such a passion of mine that I refused to put out even my first video without captions and so I spent several hours tracking this down and getting it to work. --Jdj25 20:09, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * not a bad solution :) I had forgotten about this issue. --Frantik 11:23, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
 * 0.2.5 addresses this issue. You may use 00 for a dot, such as captions00file --Frantik 12:45, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I confirm it works for me too :-) Thank you both ! --Dieudo 17:46, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

Preview images uploaded to the wiki
I want to use an image that is uploaded to my wiki as preview image in a video. Unfortunately the image= parameter doesn't do the Mediawiki magic to get the actual image from "File:preview.jpg" and therefore the player doesn't display a preview image. Ideally it would scale the image to the size of the player and use it as preview image.

In other words: I'd like to see this to work: File:Mediafile.flv

Can you implement this, please? ;-) --Cboltz 11:34, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
 * this feature is already implemented and will be in the next release.. :) --Frantik 08:48, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

I've got MediawikiPlayer 0.2.4 (July 2010) and the image from uploaded file doesn't seem to be working as in the example code above. Is there a different syntax to use? Ryan 9:57, 10 August 2010
 * You have to upload a preview image separately, the extension doesn't generate thumbnails. --Frantik 09:01, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

"image='File:image001.jpg'" is not working for me either. the preview image only shows up if i use the full path. 04:28, 19 April 2011 (UTC) --philip

'author' in $wgExtensionCredits
Hi Frantik, your declaration needs to be changed to look ok. Just change it from 'yourname' to 'yourname'. Cheers --kgh 19:42, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Displaying song info for MP3 playlist
I have JW Player 5.2 installed and Extension:MediawikiPlayer 0.2.4 on MW 1.16.0b2. I can feed an XSPF playlist to http://example.com/myplaylist.xspf and it works as expected, with track forward/backward buttons. But I would like to be able to show information about the track being played so that the user can see what it is they are listening to.

Ideally, I'd like to have a list of the songs in the playlist (maybe as a dropdown list?) that the user could click, in order to select and play a specific track. At a minimum, I'd like to get information displayed from the playlist (at least "title") in the player. The user can then skip forward or backward to the track they are looking for.

I have not been able to get this to work - am I missing something? I tried getting the Infobox plugin working by passing a flashvar to the player, e.g. http://example.com/myplaylist.xspf but that does not generate the infobox as expected.

Any ideas how to get a selectable playlist to show in the player, or at least display the title of the track playing? Thanks for the great extension!
 * You should try something like  and it will display the playlist.  Check out the JW Player's site for more info about flashvars. --Frantik 16:51, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that works. I missed that when I read through the flashvars page. Any ideas for a skin that keeps the clean interface of the default JW player skin but with only one line of text per item in the playlist? I'm aware of the Modieus Slim skin, but it doesn't maintain the look of the default skin. --Cyboreal 02:36, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The "simple" skin uses 1 line playlists and keeps most of the look of the default skin. It's one of the best ones imo --Frantik 02:14, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Generating XSPF playlist from within MediaWiki
I am using MediaWiki as a multilingual content creation platform with a multimedia focus. Having played with the JW Player and this extension, I am optimistic that it could solve the goals of the project, which include:


 * Manage all multimedia content from within MediaWiki
 * Provide downloads of all multimedia content from within MW
 * Stream all multimedia content from within MW
 * Create & publish playlists (and/or podcasts) from within MW

The first three points are already taken care of using MW and JW Player with this extension. The fourth one is an idea that I'd like to suggest as either a feature to add to this extension or possibly the purpose of a new extension.

I have an XSPF playlist stored in a MW page as raw XML that I feed to the JW Player with "?action=raw" appended to the MW URL for the page, which sends only the XML text to the player. What I am wondering is: how hard would it be to make it so this extension can take a standard MW page with links to media content and render it as an XSPF playlist for JW Player? The MW page might look something like:



but be rendered as an XSPF playlist, maybe through a "Special" page.

Or, taking it a step further, if "xspf" was registered as a hook the extension might render the XML playlist and the JW Player in one code block:



Is this possible? Are there any projects like this out there? Would anyone else find this useful?
 * I can develop this feature if you need it for your project. I am familiar with creating XSPF playlists.  You can contact me  here --Frantik 16:46, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I sent you a message. This could be a very useful tool for MW users - I look forward to seeing what you think. --Cyboreal 20:13, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Hello, I also want to implement XSPF playlists in JW in my MW. Unfortuntely, even ?action=raw to the XML page does not allow me to play the videos saved in the image folder of MW. Could you please help me? Thank you! -- 95.116.47.114 17:42, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

youtube
can i play youtube play list?--212.138.113.10 06:30, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure if JW Player supports Youtube playlists.. you should ask on their site and then use the appropriate flashvars if possible. --Frantik 17:07, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Internationalisation
File:UploadedMediafile.flv Datei:UploadedMediafile.flv
 * Before I ask for a bug-fix I wanted to say: This is a great extension.
 * Here the problem we are having: As we are using MW not in an English speaking MediaWiki environment there is a problem when implementing a movie. As of now the extension only accepts when you write:
 * and not
 * It seems the word "File" is somehow hard-coded. Can this be fixed?? Thanks again --SmartK 09:31, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Glad you like the extension :) I will look into the problem and see if i can't make it work for all languages --Frantik 17:25, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
 * This would be great! Thank you for the fast reply. --SmartK 08:35, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Hallo Frantik. I just tried Version 0.3.0 but the namespace "file" in other languages does still not work: I get this: "Video not found or access denied: Datei:test.mov" --SmartK 14:42, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok thanks.. i thought i had fixed it but i suppose not. --Frantik 22:20, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The problem is the hardcoded length of code like  . Change 5 in line 139, 144 and 151 to   --Micha fen 13:41, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Seeking time (bug)
Hi! Thanks a lot for this extention! Bur there is a bug with PlayerPointer(?):
 * Situation: I click on it (looks like [00:00:30] - for example), after that listen to or watch for a few seconds, press pause ([00:00:47]), and then press play, - the recording begins play from [00:00:30], but doesn't from [00:00:47]. Is it possible to fix? 89.251.107.5 14:56, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I didn't write the PlayerPointer "addon" but i will take a look when i get a chance :) --Frantik 21:21, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

There is also a problem in that the player must be playing in order for the PlayerPointer to work or the page must be reloaded first and then it will work.

Captions broken with JWPlayer 5.4
I was the one who got captions to work back in August 2010, which led to the 00 fix. In preparation for a new semester, I upgraded to the latest version of MediaPlayer 0.3.0 and the latest version of JWPlayer 5.4. I made the switch to use captions-2, the captions00file and the jwplayer.js instead of swfobject.js. Captions stopped working. Looking on the JWPlayer site, their example now has quotes around variable names when they contain special characters. So, instead of the HTML having captions.file:"path to file", it should be "captions.file":"path to file". If you put quotes around the variable name in the tag, it is stripped out. I was able to get it working by unintelligently adding quotes around all variable names on line 259 of version 0.3.0. This didn't seem to break things (things worked), but it would probably be better to add the quotes only if the special characters are in the name or if there was a way to specify the quotes on those variables that needed them. I thought I'd pass a fix along for others encountering this problem. --James 20:07, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

$wgMWPlayerDir Configuration Variable seems broken in 0.3.0
Unfortunately the $wgMWPlayerDir-Variable is not taken into account in Version 0.3.0. As far as I know php the problem lies in line 71 which should read if ($wgMWPlayerDir=="") $wgMWPlayerDir = $wgScriptPath. '/extensions/MediawikiPlayer'; instead of $wgMWPlayerDir = $wgScriptPath. '/extensions/MediawikiPlayer';


 * You need to set $wgMWPlayerDir after you include the file.. this change in 0.3.0 is a security measure otherwise a malicious user could set wgMWPlayerDir to anything --Frantik 04:41, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

MP3 song title / artist info
Is it possible to have the MP3 player also display song title and artist information? I do have the player working on our wiki site via a custom template and we would like to use it heavily to share our government meeting and interview podcasts. It would be great if the info we embed in the podcast MP3 file could be made visible. I didn't see an easy way to do this in the documentation here or on JW Player site. Thanks in advance for any feedback. --Bawheeler 17:34, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * it depends on the skin.. some will display it in the playlist. or you can use javascript to retrieve the info from the player --Frantik 04:43, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

How to create a XML playlist
Please explain!

Setting Up an mRSS Playlist from longtailvideo: http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/jw-player-for-flash-v5/24/setting-up-an-mrss-playlist

 MRSS Playlist Test1 FLV Video  Test1 FLV Video Test2 FLV Video  Test2 FLV Video

But how to use a created playlist in MediaWiki?

http://wiki/video/playlist.xml show only the first video on the list!

MediaWikiPlayer doesn't start wiki-video on Internet Explorer 7.0.5730 - 'The media player is loading...'
On our 'corporate' Internet Explorer (7.0.05730) the MediawikiPlayer does not start. On FireFox and Safari there are no problems.

The player keeps showing 'The media player is loading...'. I'm using the following link on my page http://SERVER_NAME/images/HaMIS S29 Webcast.m4v

Any thoughts ?

If you use the switch  within your tag, does this solve the problem?

I've just had success here with the same problem.

I think it has to do with what is presented here.

http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/13/embedding-flash

What's frustrating about this bug is I don't think its the JW Player because the JW Player extension on the wordpress platform has no problems playing on IE 6,7,8 without using SWF=true. The problem with using SWF=true is then it makes incompatible with html5 based players like the iPad, iphone etc. Would love to see a fix for this !

Switching back to JW Player Version 5.4 directly solved this problem for me -- Venia (talk) 11:46, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't work if wrapped in div tags
Hi guys, the extension is great and works fine but if i try and centre the video by wrapping it in a div it just displays the message 'the media file is loading...' and nothing else, but if I centre it using a p tag it works fine? I've tried all different options and different browsers and looked through the documentation. I don't know if I'm missing something really obvious or if it's supposed to be like that? so I thought I'd just throw it out there! 212.183.128.76 01:28, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

yt.swf
The files cant be find on the webpage linked in the installation-instructions. It would be much easier if you included the files in the Zip from the beginning.
 * yt.swf is/was a file included with JWPlayer. I can't distribute those files since they don't belong to me --Frantik 08:21, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Auto Play and Replay
is there way to make the video or audio play automatically on page load? In addition is there a skin that also has a replay button?

Wikimanz 15:57, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Opera crash?
Is this the little player that is included in Wikipedia articles where you can click to hear a song etc.? I've noticed it crashes the latest Opera 11.52 on Windows (and maybe older ones). Anyone know a workaround/fix, or even the cause? It starts playing fine, but then you can't stop or pause or anything, and in fact Opera totally stops responding and hangs. 86.182.222.189 14:44, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Can Someone give a tutorial on how to change skin for player and/or how to add addons?
Can Someone give a tutorial on how to change skin for player and/or how to add addons? I've tried reading over the info at http://www.longtailvideo.com but it hasn't worked for me. So if someone can, give us a good explanation on how to go about it.

Thank You! Wikimanz 10:16, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

align to right site of the article
Thanks for this helpfull extension. It' works successfully on my site http://thwiki.org. But i miss a function, to place it on the right site of the article like the picture thumbnail. May you add this option in a further version ?--Starwhooper 10:50, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Opening local files and m3u
Hi there. Is this extension working also with local files?

I have set up a wiki on a local server and would like to start m3u-playlist via local links like

So far this extension only seems to work with file types like *.mp3.

Thanks al lot for any help --Brocchinia (talk) 12:15, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

How to prevent black sreen on Initial Load of Jwplayer
I used this extension to load mp3 files on my website. However, when page is loading the jwplayer appears as a black screen until it fully loads and works fine. Is there a way to make the loading faster or hide the black screen. Perhaps a way to change the color to match the background of the page to make it indistinguishable? Wikimanz (talk) 02:57, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Shows only "The media player is loading" on IE8
I'm trying this extension from this morning to integrate it in mi wiki, works great itself, however i've found that it displays just a "The Media player is loading" on IE8.

No problems at all on Chrome (SRware Iron) and FF.

using latest JWplayer 5.9

I'd like to make it work even on IE8 thought...

WORKAROUND 1 (seems to work randomly, read below) it seems that IE8 prevent JS loading if it's inserted in p tag. So if you write in MediaWiki Editor:

Then MediaWiki generates this code:

So all what you have to do is prevent that MWplayer tags are inserted into p tags. For example, as a workaround you could insert a heading before tag:

WORK-AROUND 2: It seems that the workaround described above works randomly because Mediawiki sometimes put p tags around tag without apparent reason.

Now i'm using the plugin between h3 tags in this way:

This will result in a heading called "The media player is loading... // ". All what you need to change this sentence is write on line 183 of MediawikiPlayer.php whatever you want instead of that sentence. For example, i wrote "Video". However i don't know from where the 2 slashes comes from...

UPDATE: work even under, it displays a dot of course, but it doesn't conflict in TOC creation if headings > 4.

Not the best solution, but the video will load on IE8 without any hassle thought. WORK-AROUND 3: Replacing span with div at line 183 of the MediaWikiPlayer.php (two times) seems to fix the problem.

Switching back to JW Player Version 5.4 directly solved this problem for me -- Venia (talk) 11:47, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

MediawikiPlayer running with Semantic MediaWiki(SMW) and Semantic Forms(SF)
For a media collection I want to combine MediawikiPlayer(Version 0.3.0) with SMW(Version 1.7.0.2) and SF(Version 2.3.2) on MediaWiki(Version 1.17.0).

My template "MediawikiPlayer" is built like this: ... ===http://myserver/FILES/Videos/ === ...

You can see that the filename realized with a SMW attribute, recognizable by the triple { } braces. Target is to setup the attribute filename by a Sematic Form (and of course many other media properties like height, width, ...).

My SF form is build like this: ... | ...

My wikipage for showing the video is built like this:

With this wikitext snippet, the template "MediawikiPlayer" is called. The attribute Filename is in this case set to "Testvideo.flv".

Error: unfortunately the SMW attribute is not replaced while parsing/rendering by its value. The video will not bee found ...

After parsing/rendering to HTML the page code (on IE8) is like this:   // <![CDATA[ jwplayer("MWPlayer-1").setup({flashplayer: "/mediawiki/extensions/MediawikiPlayer/player.swf", width: "800", height: "600",   allowfullscreen: "true", backcolor: "eeeeee", file: "http://myserver/FILES/Videos/"}); // ]]>

You can see, that the attribute is not changed. So the player gives a black screen with an error message. I tried to move the rendering hook of MediawikiPlayer to another (let me say a 'later') point but this was not successfull. It is clear, that this is not an error of the MediawikiPlayer extension, but SMW/SF are well used extensions in many wikis, aren't they? Perhaps others got trouble with this combination, too. Any soulution ? Thanks in advance for any feedback, Markus D. 217.234.117.109 20:48, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Solution found by SWM users forum of Wikimedia mailing list, look for the solution: I changed the "MediawikiPlayer" template like this: ====== Thanks again Yaron 62.159.123.206 09:37, 18 June 2012 (UTC), Markus D.

youtube - yt.swf doesn't exist in latest jwplayer
The installation instructions say I need "yt.swf (required for youtube support)"

I just downloaded the latest jwplayer - it doesn't contain yt.swf. Does that mean MediawikiPlayer won't support youtube? If yes, how can I fix youtube integration? --Cboltz (talk) 18:49, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

JW Player is now 6
The JW FLV Media Player from www.longtailvideo.com is now v6 but MediawikiPlayer v0.3.0 requires JW Player 5 to function. --Robkam (talk) 10:31, 4 January 2013 (UTC)