JW WMV Player

Download @ LongTail Video

The JW WMV Player (built with Silverlight) is a simple, flexible player for displaying Windows Media video, audio and (live) streams on your website. While not yet as widely installed nor feature-rich as Flash, Silverlight is excellent for publishers who have content encoded in WMV or WMA. The player features a similar list of variables as the JW FLV Player, with the exception of playlist support. The 1.1 version also introduces a javascript API.

Documentation

All documentation of the JW Player can be found at the JW Player Wiki. It also includes the roadmap, source code and bug tickets. Note that as of yet there's no playlist and captioning support in the Silverlight version.

If you’ve created a CMS module that embeds the player in existing CMS systems (or you’ve found one online), please submit it here.

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Silverlight, I recommend you download the Silverlight 1.0 SDK. This SDK contains an extremely useful helpfile with a quickstart, some howtos and a complete reference. It's in a Windows help format, but MAC people can use Chamonix to view it.

Support

LongTail receives a lot of requests for creating customized versions of our player. In most cases, a clever flashvars setting can provide the solution you’re looking for, so please check the list of flashvars or the setup wizard. Also, remember we’re always expanding the player’s functionality, so check out the new features that will be plugged into the next update.

The Expression Studio software is not really needed; a decent code editor will suffice. Because the XAML code is plain XML, the design can be edited instantly.

All logic of the player's logic is in the 600-lines wmvplayer.js file. The accompanying wmvplayer.xaml file contains all graphical elements (XAML is like SVG, or the graphics part of SWF). The third file, silverlight.js, is a small helper script that places the Silverlight object on your page, which shows a download link if you haven't installed it yet. It is comparable to the SWFObject JavaScript for Flash.

Note that, despite the lack of built-in playlist support, you can easily set up a playlist with this player. Take a look at the excellent playlist examples from LongTail community member Lars Andersen, and download his Periboea library.

Note: when you install the Silverlight lugin on Windows without uninstalling the previous version, IE Silverlight support will break. This is likely a temporary issue that Microsoft will fix, but if you need to upgrade Silverlight make sure to uninstall it before installing the new version.

For tips, tricks, additional information and bug reports, please visit our support forum.