JW Player plugin SDK

Introduction

Thanks for your interest in building plugins for the JW Player! This SDK aims to help you with that, by offering three tools:

Note that you can use your IDE of choice for building plugins (e.g. Flex builder, Textmate or Adobe Flash). If you don't have Flex or Flash, you can use the free Flex SDK, which includes the MXMLC actionscript compiler. Every plugin template has a small build.sh and build.bat script that shows how to compile with MXMLC.

The plugin templates

This SDK comes with a couple of simple plugin templates, each showcasing a specific interaction with the player. They are located in the plugins folder:

The templates can be seen in action in the testing page of this SDK. (in the example dropdown box).

The testing page

The testing page contains a javascript application you can use to quickly test your plugin against various versions and configurations of the JW Player. You can select example tests, change the player, skin and plugins to load and change any flashvars.

Exactly which players, skins, plugins and examples to show can be set in the files/settings.js file. It is a javascript dictionary that is easy to understand and change, but be careful to correctly set commas and curly braces!

Next to the location of your plugin SWF file, the testing page also needs an XML file that describes your plugin. It is a simple xml format (example) that contains an overview and the list of flashvars for your plugin. You can also use this XML later on for submitting your plugin to LongTail Video.

Please note, this testing page must be run from a web server (local or remote), and should not be run from a local file.

Links to resources

The developer Wiki contains a wealth of resources for building plugins, including:

You can also find information and source code downloads from a string of plugins we built. Feel free to (re)use this code or create your own version of any of these plugins!

Submit your plugin

If you're happy with the way your plugin works, you can submit it to LongTail Video. We'll do a quick sanity check of your plugin and then list it in our addons section. You can also ask for donations of your plugin through our site to make some money. For more info about that, please contact us.