Using playlists

When streaming local content with JW Media player, instead of using a single media file, you can provide a playlist XML file. Of course, if you want to provide a playlist file, you must either use the auto tag or one of the remote variants, since only those do not append any predefined extensions automatically. Instead of providing the media url directly, you then would specify the playlist URL instead. The player supports three commonly used playlist formats to ensure maximum compatibility: XSPF (much used for CC music), RSS (much-used for Podcasts) and ATOM (much-used by Blogs). On Jeroen's website, he has placed additional examples of both an xspf playlist and an rss playlist, with nearly all supported tags included.

With playlists, you can achieve some effects, that are not available when using plain media URLs. For example, you can attach a preview image to a video. This image is shown, whenever the player is stopped. Here is a simple example. This example is used at this website for displaying a preview image in the small video on the frontpage:

 
  <playlist version="1" xmlns="http://xspf.orig/ns/0/">
    <title>CG Playlist</title>
    <trackList>
      <track>
        <title>Reloaded</title>
        <location>/images/stories/videos/matrix.flv</location>
        <image>/images/stories/videos/matrix_thumb_small.jpg</image>
      </track>
    </trackList>
  </playlist>
 

Please note also, that if you use the auto tag (without an absolute URL), then the playlist file itself must be located in the images/stories/videos subdir, even if the list references only audio files. Furthermore, if you use a .m4v file extension in the location tag, then you must specify the media type manually for the relevant track by adding the following element at the end of the track definition: <meta rel="type">flv</meta>

Playlist Display

Displaying a playlist properly can sometimes be a hassle if yo don't know how the player takes the various parameters into account. Here, I try to explain the logic: For both, the player's width and height, there exists a second parameter called displaywidth and displayheight. Normally, those are left undefined which results in the players standard display. If one of these is set to a smaller value however, the playlist will be shown. If you set displaywidth, then the playlist will be shown to the right of the videofame above the controlbar. The width of the playlist is simply width - displaywidth in that case. Using displayheight is a little bit more complicated, as the controlbar height has to be accounted for. The height of the controlbar is 20px, so if you set displayheight to a value smaller than height - 20, then the playlist fills up that difference below the controlbar. So in this case, the height of the playlist is height - displayheight - 20. There is also a special case where no playlist is shown but another effect is achieved: Setting the displayheight equally to height, makes the controlbar to be shown slightly smaller inside the video and showing/dissapearing when the mouse hovers the video.

Parameters

Some of the player's parameters are related to playlists: If you want to show the images attached to the playlist entries in the list view as thumbnails, you can set the parameter plthumbs to true.