Using the JW FLV Player with Shadowbox

[mchiocca]

Hello. I'm a little unclear as to how to use the JW FLV Player with Shadowbox to play YouTube videos. I can download Shadowbox with jQuery, slf, and flv support. The instructions in the FAQ say to download the JW FLV Player and extract it to your libraries folder, which will create a mediaplayer directory. From there, Shadowbox is supposed to be able to find the JW FLV Player. I don't have a libraries directory. Can someone please clarify how to install the JW FLV Player and configure Shadowbox to use it to play the videos? Thanks very much.

[arttronics]

This forums search tool resulted in this recent POST for that info.

[mchiocca]

Thanks for the post. I have a related question. I know that Shadowbox doesn't support iOS devices, such as the iPhone or iPad. The Shadowbox img player does actually work. I tested this using Safari on my iPhone. The only issue is that the dark opacity doesn't extend to the entire background, just a portion of it.

I now also use Shadowbox and the swf player to play YouTube videos. Adobe Flash is required in order for this to work. On iOS devices, the videos simply do not play. My understanding is that iOS devices don't support Flash so I guess this comes as no surprise. So my question is, is there a way that I can display the YouTube videos on an iOS device?

Can using the JW FLV Player solve that problem? Or is this something that simply won't work due to both limitations of Shadowbox and the lack of Flash support by the devices themselves? Thanks very much.

[arttronics]

Don't use the Shadowbox swf Player or the Shadowbox flv Player (aka JW Player) since both are flash based and you want to view YouTube videos in your iOS devices.

YouTube is experimenting with a new iframe /embed/ player that serves HTML5 video. But for that, you have to visit the YouTube page on your device and opt-in that trial so HTML5 video is served first, if available as not all videos are available in HTML5 format, flash-fallback should occur (fallback is still currently broken as of last week).

Instead, use the Shadowbox iframe Player and change your YouTube markup to use the iframe /embed/ method and not the swf /v/ method for iOS.

Basic example of format:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID

More info on YouTube parameters are HERE.

[arttronics]

Reference:
Can using the JW FLV Player solve that problem?

Although you can't use that flv player, you can use the JW iframe Embed Method that uses the Shadowbox iframe Player as shown in that other thread.

That method combined with the content from YouTube will also work for iOS, perhaps better than YouTube iframe method.