Latest release is 4.5. Learn what's new.

JW Player for Flash

The JW Player for Flash is the Internet’s most popular and flexible media player. It supports playback of any format the  Adobe Flash Player can handle, as well as HTTP and RTMP streaming and various XML playlist formats. A wide range of settings (flashvars) can be set and an extensive javascript API is available. The player's skinning functionality allows you to completely customize its look and its plugin architecture allows you to easily extend the player with features such as sharing, analytics and adserving.

There's a separate overview page for the JW Player for Silverlight?.

Documentation

General

Read these pages if you want to get started with the JW Player:

• An overview? of the player structure and functionalities.
• All flashvars? for customizing the layout, behaviour and files to load.
• All supported formats?, streaming types and XML playlists.
• Crossdomain security? restrictions and solutions.

If you want to learn about embedding the player (or another Flash movie) on a website, the  swfobject wiki is the place to go.

API & Plugins

These pages are for javascript and actionscript developers that want to interact with or extend the player:

• All API Calls? for javascript and actionscript.
• All events? that are broadcasted by the player.
• Building plugins? to extend the player's functionality.

We also have a handy plugin development SDK you can use to quickly start building plugins. It contains a copy of the testing page and some plugin templates.

Skinning

These pages are for Flash designers that want to create custom skins for the player:

• How to skin the player? using Flash CS3.
• A skin reference? that contains the name and nesting of all elements.

A couple of high-quality skins (including .fla and fonts) are available as free download in the source browser.

Source code

The source code of each version of the player can be obtained through the source code browser (click the zip links at the bottom). Full changelogs for each version can be requested here.

The latest version can be checked out through  Subversion:

svn co http://developer.longtailvideo.com/svn/trunk/as3

If you don't have a Subversion client, check out  Tortoise (Windows) or  SC Plugin (MAC).

Plugins

In the addons section of our public site, a lot of plugins are available for use with the JW Player. Here's the documentation of the plugins we built ourselves:

• Audiodescription?
• Autostarter?
• Captions?
• Clickproxy?
• HD?
• Livestream?
• Metaviewer?
• Revolt?
• Sharing?
• Snapshot?
• Yousearch?

If you want to build plugins too, download our handy plugin development SDK. It contains a copy of the testing page and some plugin templates.