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choppy playback with latest jwplayer.js on Windows Machines Only

We recently put the newest 5.3 jwplayer.js in place of the old on our server and seemed to work fine but we started getting complaints from Windows users that the playback was like little bumps and we checked on MAC's and fine...on Iphones fine....but on all Windows machines the playback was bumpin bad.
I moved back to the original 5.5 jwplayer.js and now all tours are fine on all devices.

Has anyone else experienced this? In our case we are talking hundreds of videos all encoded from different sources an all play fine in the old .js but not in the new on Windows.

Mark

8 Community Answers

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JW Player

User  
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If you are on Windows using Internet Explorer you can see the differences here in these samples:

1) Original 5.3 player http:/www.hdhathomes.com/tours/2389_tourb.html this one plays fine and smooth

2) Newest version of 5.3 player http://www.hdhathomes.com/tours/2389_tourbNEWEST.html this is bumpy and jerky...same movie with the only difference being that #1 uses earlier version of 5.3 player from when it first went on sale and #2 is the most recent version

Is everyone else seeing the radical difference in playback?

Mark

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Pablo

JW Player Support Agent  
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@Mark -

I can’t replicate this at all in IE8 / Windows 7 64-bit. Both videos play identically for me.

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JW Player

User  
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Most of the machines I personally tested it on are IE 7 or 8 and 32 bit. If it were just one machine I wouldn't be concerned but our office is a real estate office with many different computers and brands running Windows plus our clients in many places across country were experiencing the same problem.
The difference is actually staggering the newest version is just plain ugly to watch yet the #1(earlier version) plays smooth as silk.
I just tested on 4 computers all different and all had the same issue regardless of IE7 or IE8 but all were 32 bit machines.

Mark

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Pablo

JW Player Support Agent  
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@Mark -

I tested this again on a Windows 7 32-bit machine (Flash version 10,1,102,64) on IE 7 and IE 8. Again, the videos on both pages ran fine for me.

I took a look at the source code for your pages, and found that the video player itself (player.swf) is the same file in both cases. The only thing that’s different between the two pages is jwplayer.js, which contains the JavaScript embedder and API. I don’t believe this would cause your issues, but since you don’t appear to be using any JavaScript other than to embed the player, you could use another Flash embedder to put your player on the page:

http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/13/embedding-flash#The_SWFObject_Method

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Pablo

JW Player Support Agent  
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We have created a ticket to look into this issue. Check there for notes on our progress.

http://developer.longtailvideo.com/trac/ticket/1116

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JW Player

User  
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Several of us were able to confirm the problem on multiple types of machines on a couple of networks. Several hours of testing video trying find a quality that wasn't jerky - mainly in IE on windows we found that swapping out the jwplayer.js was the solution.

This is the first time we have used jw player and I would like to make sure our jwplayer.js is as up-to-date as possible until a fix is released. We grabbed the jwplayer.js code from Mark's working video example, but I have no idea which version that is, or whether it is the most recent known working version.

Would someone provide a link to the most recent know working version of jwplayer.js?

Thanks!

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JW Player

User  
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Unfortunately it looks like it comes down to the "wmode" parameter. Remove the following two pieces of code from the most recent version of the jwplayer.js and playback performance will improve quite a bit:

bc.. f+='<param name="wmode" value="opaque">';


and

bc.. a.embed.appendAttribute(h,"wmode","opaque");


Just to be sure it was this setting, and not the new javascript code, I added the IE value:

bc.. f+='<param name="wmode" value="opaque">';


to the appropriate place in the version of jwplayer.js from Mark's working example (above) and sure enough the problem reared its ugly head.

For some it shouldn't be that big a thing to remove this code. Bit of a bummer in out case as we have a drop down navigation that will have to be reworked so it does not sit behind the video at the top of the page - if any one knows a magic trick outside of specifying the appropriate wmode please share :)

Take this with a gain of salt as it's been a long while since I've worked with more intensive flash apps and I've not really worked with video much at all... It seems like this may be a problem with the Flash player and not jw player. Tried a .swf only version of our test video with no controls (and without using jwplayer) in our site and as soon as I specified "opaque" or "transparent" it started playing a little more choppy.

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Pablo

JW Player Support Agent  
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@Justin -

Looks like you’ve found the root of the problem. The wmode parameter is currently hard-coded to “opaque” in the JW Embedder (jwplayer().setup). wmode=opaque normally performs fairly well, as long as there aren’t DOM elements which interact with Flash; if you rework your navigation such that it doesn’t overlap with the Flash player at all, this may solve the issue. Otherwise, as you discovered, you can remove the wmode parameter from jwplayer.js, or you can replace “opaque” with “window” (the default value).

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