JPlayer : HTML5 Audio & Video for jQuery | Hacker News Reader

JPlayer : HTML5 Audio & Video for jQuery

jplayer.org

58 pointsolalonde24 comments

We used JPlayer at the Facebook University Hackathon series this year, and while it wasn't always a joy to work with it was far faster than rolling our own. As others have said, super easy to reskin, handles cross-browser compatibility fairly well; overall a great boon to anyone looking to quickly get up and running with HTML5 a/v

I used this to make a simple player for my personal audio portfolio website, and it was super easy to use and reskin. I had trouble getting multiple tracks to play, but I just started messing around with jQuery, so I think it was a factor of that learning curve. Highly recommended. Once you get multiple songs working you can make an interface for adding or removing them as well, I would love to implement this as well. I guess the point of my long rambling post is use it because it works and it is compatible and awesome. Edit: You can also easily use the Soundcloud or Bandcamp api to stream your tracks directly to your jPlayer, which is super useful.

As one of the developers of jPlayer - it's great to see this discussion. We're a building up the motivation to create a new release and we'd be interested in hearing any ideas the HN community has.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups&pli=1#!topic...

(Comment here or in the group).

PS Little known fact - pandora.com uses jPlayer or at least it used to when I last used a VPN to check it :)

We use JPlayer here at Senzari (http://senzari.com/) and it's been a blast to use, very easy to skin and supports fallbacks (HTML5, Flash) for every supported file format.

My only issue with it is the progress bar integration with the flash player.

We reskinned and moved every single element of it: http://cl.ly/2s323p2a1a3D3I1f1H44

I have written a simple WebAudioPlayer around it. You give it an URL with some MP3 directory listing, it loads that and plays them all in queue.

https://github.com/albertz/WebAudioPlayer

E.g.: http://albertz.github.com/WebAudioPlayer/#http://28c3.ex23.d...

Very neat.

What i don't understand- probably to do with the jPlayer- is that it seems to know the length of the song before it has all loaded (because of the seekbar lengths), yet it only increases the time string as the file is loaded.

Just discovered a week or so ago and have been using on a little side project. So far nothing but good things to say about JPlayer. Skins are easy to create, it loads well, looks nice enough. Great for prototyping with if nothing else.

Though with all the good things about JPlayer, the codec issues and incompatibilities amongst browsers, I cannot say the same for HTML5 video in general.

If you're prototyping with JPlayer, what is your final product gonna be in?

I was thinking about using on a project, that's why I'm asking.

I've used JPlayer for some personal projects (e.g. https://github.com/pfarrell/pshare3). It's very easy to setup and use. I haven't gone as far as creating my own skins, but since it's all jquery and css, modifying existing ones is a no-brainer.

I've used JPlayer as a cross-browser audio player in a small project (https://github.com/lpinca/binb). The javascript APIs are very well made.

Can anyone say how this compares to mediaelementjs? They seem to be very similar. I liked mediaelement.js, but ran into massive problems when using it in a colorbox under IE8.

So what is the advantage in using this over say jwplayer? Don't we still need to prepare the video in different formats to target various browsers?

This is a great solution for audio and video, I've used it on several projects. The docs are top-notch as well.

I know it isn't the typical use case but is there anything similar that (also) supports flac? (or even wma?)

Are you planning on serving (or streaming with a lot of buffering) FLAC audio on a public site? Why not re-encode and save everyone bandwidth?

No, it would be for LAN use with a web-app.

Wouldn't that still potentially affect your LAN's performance? At >1Mbit per stream, it seems they could add up fast. Even on a LAN, I'd want to minimize traffic volumes where possible in most cases.

I'm just curious if this is a matter of convenience, wanting to avoid re-encoding, or if the fidelity is actually critical, and these would be playing back on studio monitor speakers for close scrutiny.

I guess if I were trying to play FLAC and WMA files from a local server, I would typically mount the remote share and use native client-side software to play them, which is typically a more pleasant user experience than browser-based solutions.

Yes, it is wanting to avoid encoding and the associated delay and/or disk space. If I could re-encode and immediately stream with insignificant latency, with a weak CPU, then that might be a reasonable option.

Private site over LAN or high speed internet are targets for web clients: https://github.com/Mach5/supersonic/issues/34

Audiogalaxy supports both those formats, and has an API you can use to play those formats as ogg using jPlayer, perhaps? http://www.audiogalaxy.com/misc/developer

What are the shortcomings of using JPlayer?

I heard only positive reviews, and would love to get the flipside, if there's any.

i have experienced some issues when using internet explorer 8. the ready event of the player is not fired so you cant bind any media to it..

Does it read chapter titles via the track tag? I don't see it mentioned anywhere.

Love this thing, I've used it on a bunch of projects. The javacript API is great.

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