Update: JW7 is now released! You can check out our new CSS Skinning here.
We’re pleased to announce the release of the JW Player for Flash Version 5.2. One of the JW Player’s strongest features is its flexible skinning model. Our focus for JW5.2 has been on improving on its XML/PNG skinning abilities.
We’ve also fixed over 30 discrete bugs, and added a number of performance and feature enhancements.
New Skinning Features
- The Controlbar, Your Way – Previously, skin designers could only alter the look and feel of the controlbar buttons. With JW Player 5.2, you can now lay your controlbar buttons out in any order you want, as well as insert any non-button image into the controlbar’s layout. Also, there are no longer any required controlbar elements, so you can leave out anything you don’t want.
- Customized Buffer Icons – With JW Player 5.2, you have more control over the rotation of the player’s buffering indicator. You can control how fast the icon rotates, and the angle of each rotation.
- Fine-Grained Color Support – The new skinning model now supports customized background colors for every player component. You can have one background for the playlist, another for the controlbar, and a third for the display. You can also set colors for all of the text fields in the player as well.
- Advanced Font Controls – The skinning model now supports customization of the controlbar and playlist’s text fields. You can change the font size, color, and use all Flash-supported system fonts (_sans, _serif and _typewriter). You can even make them bold and / or italic. Go nuts!
- Slider End-Caps For Everyone – A much-requested feature was the ability to add end-caps to the controlbar and playlist slider elements. The 5.2 player now allows you to create end-caps for the volume slider, the time slider and the playlist slider.
Say Hello to Glow
Created by JW himself, the new Glow skin takes advantage of the new 5.2 skinning features. Check it out for yourself:
You can download the Glow Skin from our Skins Library.
Other Updates
Not a skin designer? No problem! Just sit back and wait as some sweet new skin submissions begin appearing in our Skins Library. We’ve also got a few updates for you:
Enhancements
- Improves switching logic for dynamic RTMP streams
- Handles YouTube’s upcoming URL change
- Specifies playlist and plugin sizes in percentage rather than pixels
- Example: “playlist.size=50pct”
- Adds support for a “playlist.image” playlist item property, which allows a different thumbnail image to be displayed in the playlist
Bug Fixes
JW Player for Flash Version 5.2 fixes over 30 bugs. Here are a few of the major ones:
- Allows YouTube videos to be embedded in HTTPS pages
- Makes the YouTube logo clickable
- Fixes an issue where some dynamic streams only switch on resize events
- Fixes an issue which would cause dynamically switched RTMP livestreams to close early
- No longer hides the the display image when playing AAC or M4A audio files
- Allows querystring parameters for .flv files streamed over RTMP. This fixes a problem some Amazon CloudFront users were having with private content.
To see everything we’ve done in this release, check out the complete list of changes in JW Player 5.2 on our developer wiki.