We are trying to setup a JW 6 Player for both VOD and Livestream. For the Livestream we understand that JW 6 should be able to "detect" that it is serving a live stream, and then offer a different control bar. The control bar is different in appearance to the VOD control bar.
The live stream control bar should have a play and pause button enabled. There should be no numbers on the ends of the control bar.
Questions: Is there a document/link which explains how we can setup the JW 6 player to detect the livestream and offer the "live stream" view of the control bar?
The stream is live, it is a loop. We offer different formats, but it is the same loop. When we changed the format, the player automatically detects it is a "live stream" and displays "live" in the JW Player. For some reason the RTSP format does not work in the same way that the other formats do.
It looks like perhaps we will need to build a custom skin to resolve the issue. We have started building this, using the existing skin six in the skin sdk.
Question: Is there an existing element source in base64 that we can use to replace the whole timeSlider? What is the element name which can be used to replace all timeSlider elements, so that only a single image shows?
Thank you for the help. I am asking about the possibility of using a longer running loop.
We have already commented out the elements, as you mentioned. We want to get the word "Live" in the space where the timeslider normally resides. What is the best way to accomplish that? (is there a simple way to use text in this space?)
We notice if the stream is paused, once we click on the play again, the stream never begins to run again. Could you say why this happens? It is our plan to implement stop and play functionality (below), but are not sure if there is another issue at play here.
Stop and Play functionality: We need to toggle between a play button and a stop button. If the play button is clicked, the stream starts. If the start button clicked, the stream stops. To implement this stop button, is it possible to implement this in the Skin? Or must we implement some sort of JavaScript function in the page itself? Given the issue above (stream does not restart), do we need to seek the position of the stream?
Thank you for the link, this is a cool piece of functionality, but unfortunately it does not solve our problem. Simply what we are looking for is that the JW player displays that the stream is a live stream, in all browsers and OS.
It appears there is an issue with the Flash player or with .smil file format. When we view the page with Windows & Firefox the JW Player uses the Flash player. It has the following issues: 1.) it does not detect that this is live stream (albeit a loop) and display a livestream controlbar. 2.) Once started, and then paused, the player does not find the stream again but continues to hunt.
When running Firefox&Windows using m3u8 format, the player displays the livestream JW player. Also the stream can be stopped and started, no problems as per above. In this case, it is running also as an Flash player, running the m3u8 format.
When viewing the player through iOS and Safari, the player displays the livestream JW player. The stream can be stopped and started, no problems as per above. In this case, it is running as an HTML 5 player, running the m3u8 format.
We have tried to force the use of the HTML5 player to see if this resovles the problem. However we have not been able to force the JW player to use HTML 5 version. Even if we are able to do this, we are still facing the problem of Flash in older browsers. So using the HTML5 player will not fix all issues.
This is a live stream, therefore we need the player to show the stream as a livestream in all browsers and all OS. Could someone take a look at the test page and help us resolve this issue?
Here is a test page which has our test streams: http://www.hopechannel.no/jwplayer/skin/jwtest.php
Player 1 shows the issue we are experiencing with problems 1 and 2 above. This is using the .smil file to offer 3 quality files.
Player 2 shows the m3u8 stream which does not have this problem.
We have looked through many pages in JW Player support, but most appear to be pointing to older versions of the JW Player. We are running version 6.8.
Thank you for your continuing assistance to resolve our problems. We are using the .smil file so that we can offer various quality streams. Depending on the device a visitor is using, we want to provide the best matching format.
In further testing, I removed all formats except for the smil. format. For a JW Player using a .smil file, once a running JW Player is stopped, it can not be restarted. I further tested using one of the RTMP files that the smil file serves up and the exerience was the same.
Is there a known issue with JW Player and the SMIL format or is the problem with the RTMP format?
Thank you and we are looking at this option. We are not sure that our customer will be able to go this route. Can you please clarify the previous question? Is there a problem with the JW Player and RTMP format? We need to know our options forward.
Thank you for the link to the page. It looks like this is what we have implemented. I have modified the test page here to show the two configurations possible for multi-bit streaming (RTMP and M3U8):
Configuration 2 [only one SMIL file with 3 qualities RTMP]
Configuration 3 [only one SMIL file with 3 qualities m3u8]
We understand from the first post in this thread that the JW Player should detect that this is a Livestream. Both of the Configurations 2 & 3 are being looped as Livestreams.
The following problems have been noted with configurations 2 & 3:
Configuration 2 - does not display that this is a Livestream - if stream is paused it can not be restarted it hunts and never plays the stream again. - if a paused stream has the bitrate switched, the player does restart, probably becuase the new quality is loaded into the player.
Configuration 3 - displays that it is a livestream - if the bitrate is changed multiple times, to test the various qualities, the stream appears to become corrupted and the player has to be restarted.
How can we get the player to correctly display that this is a Livestream AND resolve the issues with the above configurations?
