I am now using an embedded Windows Media Player (tutorial) and I can manipulate with time slider through Javascript. But then I discovered the Jlembed plugin for jQuery and thought it solves all my problems because of the different platforms, etc.
But after I spent a few hours in setting things up I relized that it does not have functions like setCurrentTime or getCurrentTime and these functions are most important for my type of project.
Is there a way to achieve this functionallity with Jlembed?
As far as I know, Windows Media Player does not support the type of interaction you're trying to achieve with it's embedded player. I did not include any javascript functions for Windows Media Player because it is not necessary. jlEmbed does not affect your ability to control the embedded player with javascript. So, if Windows Media Player supports a particular script, jlEmbed supports it also.
If there is a javascript API for WMP please point me in that direction and I will add better support for it, but I don't think it exists. However, if one does exist, jlEmbed will not prevent you from scripting as would normally be done.
I spent a great deal of time on the YouTube support, but only because I had to. Otherwise, it would have been much more difficult to control the YouTube player, which is the most popular and widely available media player on the web.
Only a small percentage of users will actually be able to use your embedded WMP presentation. The YouTube player is compatible with any browser that supports Flash. You would be better off creating a custom 'chromeless' YouTube player than using WMP for your presentation. An even better alternative would be to use Flash to make your video presentation.
According to the documentation, the following functions exist that might help:
jlembed_seekTo(playerId, seconds, allowSeekAhead)
jlembed_getCurrentTime(playerId)
Hope that helps!
Related
I'm a Javascript dilettante. I need to make a webpage for mobile viewing to deploy a dynamically created but ultimately linear audio piece. Essentially I would need to load a playlist, in which some tracks are fixed but others are randomly chosen from a larger pool; there also need to be timed pauses between some of the tracks. It would need only minimal controls, probably just play/pause.
I'm looking into Web Audio API and the basic HTML5 <audio> tag. My two main concerns for choosing between them are compatibility and simplicity of use.
On the compatibility point, I see that on the main page for the API itself it lists no support for Android, but on this more detailed rundown almost all browsers are listed as green. What's the best source to trust?
Assuming Web Audio API is viable for mobile deployment, do I need to use it? Would it make my life easier or is it just overpowered for my purposes? I see it has a handy onended event handler which I see myself using for queuing, and precise timing functions. It also seems to be more explicit about loading the files asynchronously with a callback function on success - I'd want to have a loading screen so that would be useful.
I'm a bit less clear on the capabilities of <audio>. I guess it must be able to do everything I want given HTML5 players have been built before Web Audio API came along - but is it more fiddly?
Web Audio works just fine on mobile.
Web Audio, in contrast to <audio>, breaks apart and give the developer precise control over the loading, decoding and playing of audio. If you need precise timing - like, beat-synching - of audio, you should probably use web audio. <audio> is pretty imprecise.
That said, a few caveats - as Web Audio by default uses in-memory buffers, it can use a lot more memory than <audio>, and it doesn't have native components to do streaming audio. The onended event is NOT the right way to do real chaining of audio, because it's a main-thread-Javascript callback (that is to say, any event handling like this might be delayed by other JS, garbage collection, etc. - and it might be off by 50 or 100 milliseconds). If you really care about timing, you have to plan ahead and use Web Audio scheduling. (This article I wrote describes this in more detail.)
It might be a duplicate, but I didn't quite find the answer, so what is more efficient - using just a plain video element (if i dont need support for ie8, for example and all the fancy stuff), or using some plugins for video like video.js?
My main concern is load time - is there something that makes video files load faster when using video plugins?
With a plugin (be it Flash or a framework like video.js) you have the load/initialization time of the plugin itself to consider, though that will be largely minimal compared to the pre-load time of the video. Some Flash players have a fairly large .swf file though most (like most of the .js frameworks you'll come across) are pretty well optimized these days.
The largest chunk of time, with either, will be the pre-buffering to get to a state where the video can play through without further buffering. This will be impacted by the resolution, framerate etc of the video itself and optimizations like the positioning of the MOOV atom (if it's at the start of an .mp4 for instance then the browser doesn't have to read/cache the entire clip before it will start playing)
Flash (a plugin) may have better support for different types of media (for instance if you want to use a fMPEG format like HLS or DASH) but may restrict the devices/platforms you can run on. HTML5 and the <video> tag will - as you point out - only be available on more modern browsers and with or without a player framework to extend it offers a lot of flexibility (and capabilities are improving with time). This is a good overview of pros and cons.
I'm working on a fairly simple mobile App, geared more towards people who may have trouble with technology. As such, it needs to be as easy to use as possible and I need to be able to play HTML5 audio/video files on start. The problem, as many of you may know, is that mobile devices tend to turn off Autoplay of video content for bandwidth purposes. I'm told there are ways around it using some mild scripting, but all the resources I've found seem to either be outdated, or unsuited to my needs. The development tool I'm using allows me to plug in HTML5 code, but I need to be able to plug in a video that will run without user input. It should also be noted that these video's must be hosted online somewhere (ie, It cant have the video load from inside the app).
Any Help you could give me on this issue would be greatly appreciated.
You didn't specify OS or device or browser. It's been a long time and you probably don't care anymore but if anyone else comes past this, my answer.
Try placing "playsinline" inside the video tag.
Eg. <video playsinline> </video>
I can confirm this works in iOS 10.
There are a number of JavaScript libraries available for HTML5 audio, to either make a developer's life easier, ensure cross-browser compatibility or support Flash fallback for older browsers.
I haven't found much in terms of comparatives, except maybe for this article, on a small scale.
Which of the following libraries come recommended and for what purposes? What can I expect in terms of documentation and support (eg: is that library likely here to stay?)
Audio5JS
Buzz
HowlerJS
jPlayer
MediaElementJS
SoundJS
SoundManager2
I don't need UI features for my needs and would rather keep things small and simple. That would seem to make Audio5JS a candidate of choice. However I'm wondering if that's a smart choice simply because it doesn't seem to have as big a community as, say, jPlayer.
EDIT: I simply need to play an audio file (in full and/or parts of it) based on user input and the ability to loop that for a given file (ie: loop the file itself or loop a part of it.)
General guidelines on how to pick a JS library to get a job done will also be welcome.
I mainly wanna save myself the need to try out all those libraries (and more) to figureout their pro's and con's.
Thank you.
You may have already selected a library, but as the developer of howler.js, I thought I'd leave a note. From your description, I'd say howler.js is exactly what you are looking for if you don't need less than IE9 support. howler.js has now been under development/refinement for nearly a year and has a large community around it. It is great for both simple and complex tasks, and leaves any UI needs up to the developer. howler.js is currently the only library that I'm aware of that lets you seamlessly use both Web Audio API and HTML5 Audio with a single, simple API.
My recommendation would be SoundJS, but I may be biased because I work on it.
It allows you to get audio up and running with minimal code that will work across all modern browsers. Looping and playing from an offset both work smoothly. As far as I know, looping only a slice of a larger audio file smoothly can only be done with pure web audio, which currently is only supported in Chrome and Safari. SoundJS doesn't support that functionality directly, but does allow you access the web audio nodes directly so you can set it up manually.
Hope that helps.
You can also check out http://musquitojs.com/. It provides a simple API to create and play sounds.
For example, to play a sound all you've to do is.
import $buzz from 'musquito';
$buzz.play('gunfire.mp3');
The library also supports Audio Sprites.
I understand that the best bet when streaming a video as a source in an HTML5 tag would be .mp4. But let's say that I have a source that only outputs fragmented to an ism/manifest.
Is there any way at all, whether through other libraries or messy hacks, that I can bring this video into something rendered as a tag onscreen? The closest I have found is Walkthrough: Building Your First HTML5 Smooth Streaming Player because it allows this to be done - but I neither have Windows 8, or want to have this running a server capable of .NET. I was hoping there was something, messy or not, that I could achieve this with entirely within javascript and executable locally without a deploy.
Thanks
Firstly, W3C does not provide a standard for adaptive bitrate streaming, yet. So for the time being most browsers only support simple progressive download playback.
Hence, there is no JS implementation of a Smooth Streaming player and Microsoft is not working on one, as far as I know.
The example you provide uses the "Microsoft Smooth Streaming Client SDK Beta 2 for Windows 8" which is a C++ library and is only available for Windows Store Apps development. It has nothing to do with browsers.
So, unfortunately this is not yet possible. Even more, I doubt that this will ever happen, because everybody is waiting for MPEG DASH to be finalized.
UPDATE.
Please, notice that you always can use Siverlight application for playing SmoothStreaming. The referenced HTML5 Player framework is capable of falling back to Silverlight.
no luck for Microsoft Smooth Streaming, but regarding MPEG-DASH which is similar (see http://blog.johndeutscher.com/2013/06/10/mpeg-dash-preview-from-windows-azure-media-services):
"Dash.js is permissively licensed (under the BSD license) and can therefore be studied and reused by anyone seeking to provide their own DASH-AVC/264 compliant player. The goal is to make it easier for third-parties to build adaptive streaming video players."
http://msopentech.com/blog/2013/06/20/ms-open-tech-contributes-to-open-source-adaptive-streaming-video-player/
also see:
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/media-source/media-source.html
which is required for Dash.js