JW Player 6 auto hiding the control bar with HTML5 mode
I've researched this extensively in the forums and the web. For JW Player 6 in HTML5 mode, I cannot seem to prevent the controlbar from hiding when the state is idle. Previous versions had this ability via the 'controlbar.idlehide' boolean property. I need to support this ability to have the controlbar always visible in HTML5.
I've read the migration guide, although I'm not migrating, we are starting fresh on JW Player 6. In the migration guide, the only pertinent topic I can find is:
Added: Quality, Button and Controls APIs These new API classes control manual quality selection, adding/removing custom buttons to the player and showing/hiding the built-in controls. See the Javascript API Reference for details. Removed: the events configuration block This way of adding event listeners is fully redundant with adding listeners outside the setup, both in terms of features and amount of code required.
I've reviewed the API reference many times. I cannot find anything in the reference that states the event listeners can be used to control the display of the controlbar. As well, I do not see an event listener that receives an event argument that allows for control of the toolbar when the toolbar is idle. There is the following event handler:
onControls(callback) Fired when controls are enabled or disabled by a script. Event attributes: controls (Boolean): New state of the controls. Is true when the controls were just enabled.
This only passes in a boolean for the new state of controls, which doesn't allow for control of the idle hiding. As well, I've setup many event listeners which are documented in the JavaScript reference, but when I setup the event listener for onControls(), either with or without an argument, the event never firers.
Can you provide me with a little more guided support, potentally which specific event listener I should be using, and a simple snippet for how I would control the idle display of the control bar? Thanks.
I see this is the expected behavior for the controls to fade out. I'm asking for a way to prevent that behavior. This appears to have been supported in previous versions but is no longer supported now? I can provide valid use cases for why we would like the control to always be visible.
Thanks for your help. If you can post a link to the ticket when/if it is created that would be helpful as well. It's priority may become important when we discuss the enterprise licensing. Thanks.
I'll second this and add that this was supported behavior in the past that alone should be enough justification to keep it (did you all provide a use case when you decided to remove it?). There is no hover state on a touch device and when streaming from YouTube the YouTube screen bug seems to get in the way of triggering the show event for the dock.
Also, what is all this mumbo jumbo for (with 0 examples I might add) in the JW Player 6 guide (http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/28839/embedding-the-player): bc.. Layout
These are the options for configuring the layout of the player:
controls Whether to display the video controls (controlbar, icons and dock). Can be false or true (default).
Also, Is there a way to search the forums for solutions that pertain to JW 6? None of the JW 5 results are very helpful.
On Touch devices we don’t draw the controls. It’s the native browser controls. So what you really want is for Apple and Google to update their HTML5 video implementations. However, we’re looking into providing our own controls on Touch – that way we can display them all the time.
For audio (again on desktops only), we do have an “audio” mode for JW Player that has the controlbar never fade out if there’s audio instead of video playing. Please let us know if there’s a case in which the controls still don’t fade.
Eric:
Having the controls “over” the video instead of below it makes the chrome of the video player much less present. The player becomes more nimble and it’s all about the video during playback. There’s also no issues anymore about thinking about the size of the controls when setting the player width/height. Last, every html5 browser and nearly every video platform has controls over the video, so it’s also the standard way to do this nowadays.
Not sure what you refer to as “mumbo jumbo”? There’s a boolean called “controls” that allows you to completely hide all player controls. The accompanying example is the “Chromeless player” one. I’ll drop the word chromeless in there, as well as a link to the setup:
Eric: there’s no way yet to search forums for JW6-only questions. That’s a good one we may be able to add (e.g. by asking the poster of a question the player version). For mow, maybe including “jw6” in your searches may help.
Is there a download for JW Player 5 premium? I am really trying to like 6 and the embed code is much much nicer but the lack of control over the interface is a deal killer for me.
It's great that you all are forward looking with trends in design but from my own perspective (and judging from the forum posts I have run across I am not alone) I would much prefer it if you were not quite so strict in your vision.
The ability to move the control bar completely off of the video and have near total control over placement and visibility seems like a pretty major thing to take away from your clients. Also, keep in mind your clients have clients too and they also have their own opinions.
For future reference do you have any suggestions on how to resolve the conflict between the JW player control bar and the youtube graphic?
We’re definitely keeping an eye on this issue and are looking into options to re-introduce some more developer control over the UI. At the same time, we want to ensure this then works on mobile (which it doesn’t yet). We also need to clearly define and develop when exactly the controls show (i.e. when is the player “in focus”?).
We may reintroduce a controlbar-bottom option after we have been able to render our own controls on Touch devices. That will solve the YouTube logo issue.
A specific hack shorter-term is to use a custom skin and set the “max-width” of the controlbar in that skin to a small number, such that the controlbar doesn’t stretch across the bottom. This will keep the YT logo visible 100% of the time, even with controls on.
I'm not overly concerned with the visibility of the youtube logo, it is more that the mouseover event that triggers the display of the control bar does not happen on the bottom 25% of the video container when streaming from youtube. So if the user moves their mouse directly to where the control bar should appear and is coming from beneath the video the controls never show up.
Yeah, that’s an issue with YouTube we still have to figure out. YT forbids us to overlay anything over the lower 3rd of the video, since that’s where the logo and overlay ads appear…
Thanks, all this could be circumvented by allowing an always visible dockbar and reinstating the ability to move the dockbar to a position below the video would help keep the YouTube ToS intact.
You do realize that by not keeping the controlbar visible at the bottom, the videos are not Accessibility compliant. A person with limited manual dexterity, or for that matter, a blind person, would not be able to access the controls.
Yes, we know. Keeping the controls visible will not make them any more accessible – additional work (ARIA labels etc.) still needs to gets done to make that work well.
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