I’m a couple versions behind on Flowplayer and trying to upgrade to the latest version and having problems… If any Flowplayer experts can chime in, I’d appreciate it (Gumdrop?)…
First, let me see if I understand the upgrade process… In a blog scenario, you’d have one javascript call at the the top of the page. That defines the Flowplayer function. Obviously, each time you upgrade you don’t want to to have add a new javascript call in the head section, so the new javascript takes over and needs to work with the old embed scripts.
Now, in terms of the player (the swf), it’s referenced in the embed code, and historically it’s had a version number specified in the file name. In the past I’ve just changed it’s name to flowplayer.swf and then used new players with old embed codes. But is it better to keep the version number in there and have old embed codes play with old players?
It’s a simple page. It has a call to the latest Flowplayer javascript, and then two embed codes - an existing embed code from a recent blog post, and then how I think the new embed code would work, calling the new player (swf).
With the old embed code I’m trying to see if it’s backwards compatible. It’s using the new Javascript to call an old player (swf). It sorta works. The issue is sometimes I have to click a second time to get it to start. Sometimes it just never starts playing the video at all. Reloading the page often fixes the problem. I’m not really comfortable upgrading if it’s going to break all my current embedded videos. So I’m not sure why sometimes I have to click twice and sometimes it just doesn’t work.
The new embed code that references the new player doesn’t work at all. It just goes black. I have no clue what I’m doing wrong.
It works on our server. I copied your page and changed the file paths to reflect our flowplayer locations, and it worked. So my guess is you have something in your directories blocking it.
Also, when we upgraded Flowplayer, we found it better to let the old scripts there and just use the new one on new pages. Just changing out the swf and js files did not work when we went from one version to the next. Minor updates work fine though.
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With the old embed code I’m trying to see if it’s backwards compatible. It’s using the new Javascript to call an old player (swf). It sorta works. The issue is sometimes I have to click a second time to get it to start. Sometimes it just never starts playing the video at all. Reloading the page often fixes the problem. I’m not really comfortable upgrading if it’s going to break all my current embedded videos. So I’m not sure why sometimes I have to click twice and sometimes it just doesn’t work.
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I am not sure why you would test backward compatibility of the old player with the new code. Even if the document says its OK, the new javascript code can be expected to have new functions that the old player may not support. I would migrate both or none.
On your test page, the first player did not play, the second player played once, then the screen goes black. When I first loaded the page the second player showed the “new” control bar, but on subsequent reloads of the page, it shows the old one.
This appears fishy -
<script type=“text/javascript”>// <![CDATA[
var player = flowplayer(“video43077-2012”, “/resources/flowplayer.swf”);
// ]]></script></p>
In the first script, you declare a variable, but in the second you don’t.
I had some issues on my first attempt at upgrading, but second time it was OK and now its running successfully. If I recall what I did, I will post the steps here. But I create symbolic links that are generic e.g. “flowplayer.swf”, that points to the version I want to use, if it doesn’t work, I can easily roll back to the previous version by changing the link.
Also btw, I currently don’t use the javascript, I just use an embed code. However, I plan to use the javascript method when I re-code my site.
I had configured our servers to gzip most file types (I had exempted some common file types like jpg, some video files, etc.) Turns out Flowplayer will fail if you have your server set to gzip swfs. I turned that off and now everything seems to work.
It’s simple. I don’t want 35 different javascript calls declared in the header of my pages. Plus, that wouldn’t work anyway - the function flowplayer () can only be declared once on a page. This isn’t a tube site - I can’t easily update all the embed codes. Wordpress has the same head include for all pages and multiple videos could be on the same page - each with a different player version. I don’t mind having multiple players, but at a minimum the javascript has to be backwards compatible. Then the question becomes whether to rename the player with a generic non-versioned name or have it with a versioned name. Looks like I’ll go with the versioned name going forward…
Now I just need to do some more testing and work on supporting iPhones/iPads, etc…