Synchronized Slides for the JW FLV Player – Two New Plugins
For years I’ve been hearing and reading about demand for a simple synchronized slides plugin for the JW Flash Video player. Sure, you can do it with some Javascript: add event listeners to track the play-head position and use that to trigger image loads in a separate DIV. But that requires page scripting and introduces dependencies that might not always be do-able.
But I always thought there oughtta be a simpler way. So I made one. Honestly, I didn’t know if it was possible using the JW Plugin API, and while I’m a pretty good Java/Web programmer, I’m definitely not a Flash/ActionScript ace. So I decided to give it a try as a learning experience. The result is two plugins for the JW FLV Player: SlideSync and SlideScroller. These are free for commercial and non-commercial use.
You can see an example of the SlideSync and SlideScroller plugins in action, or look at documentation of the options and parameters, or go to Longtail Video’s plugin pages for the SlideSync and SlideScroller plugins.
There’s a lot of room for improvement and growth in this. It’s really a first-effort, but should be useful anyway in some cases. There are still reasons to use the Javascript event-listener model as well, which offers lots of flexibility and control you won’t get from the this plugin. But for simplicity, this is a good start. Feedback is welcome. Improvements welcome, too! The source is linked on the documentation page.
Video and Multimedia Technology, Web and Software Development
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jwplayer plugins slidesync slidescroller
Themocracy
Hi Larry
First, thanks for creating these two great plugins. I’ve been looking for something like this for some time. Im having a slight issue with the slidescroller plugin though. When using RTMP instead of progressive download you are unable to select the first slide in the slidescroller, the video pauses momentaraly and then continues on rather then jumping to the first slide, but navigating to any other slides works fine.
The example linked on this page uses RTMP and can navigate to the first slide, so I think there’s something else going on.
The one thing I’ve seen that can consistently cause odd navigation issues is related to the video file itself – you can only navigate to points at which there are keyframes in the encoding. I’ve seen videos in which you cannot navigate directly to a particular slide due to there being no keyframe available nearby. Typically, I’ve seen this be a problem more for http than rtmp, but I haven’t tested extensively to see exactly under which conditions it occurs most.
I’d recommend checking the keyframe interval of the video – perhaps trying an encoding that has a fixed, more frequent keyframe interval and see if that helps.
thanks for your quick reply. I think you’re right about it been to do with the key frames because I changed the time entry for the first slide from 0 to 1 second in the xml file and I can now navigate back to the first slide when using RTMP. Thanks again for the good work on the plugin
regards
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Larry,
Your slidesync plugin works great, I am wondering if you would be interested in sponsored further development of the slidesync plugin to add support for playlists.
Certainly…contact me at larryb at learningapi dot com.
Thank you for the awesome plugins.Great information.Can you give more updates.
It’s a great work from your side. The two new plugins will prove to be very useful for us. Being a flash user, we never thought of such a plugin but you being a coder did that task. Keep on adding new resources for us. Thanks for sharing the post. Bye.
Hi Larry
Thank you for this great plugin. I am having behavioural issue when I publish this on the server. I have a dev environment and staging environment (shared hosting). I am using moodle with FLV player plugin and using slide sync. It worked perfectly in my dev environment but for somereason on the staging server the image/slide does not shrink to fit the right square and does not fade out to show the slide. Other than that it works ok. If you want to check it out please go to http://moodle.utrujj.org/mod/flv/view.php?id=55 and login using username: reshmi and password: reshmi
Thank you