Flowplayer 3.0.3 is out! Jan 7, 2009

A fairly large release this time

This bug fix release fixes many important issues. Complete list of changes can be found from our version history. Look for flowplayer.swf and flowplayer.js sections.

Core fixes / features

Here are the highlights of this release and you can see that there are some new features also included

the API method play() now accepts an array of clip objects (a playlist) as an argument. This is the same as setPlaylist with the exception that the playback starts. setPlaylist cannot start playback anymore.
ability to re-install player to the same player container with a whole new configuration. This is achieved by calling flowplayer installation function again to the same container.
video URL is given in href- attribute is now overridden by the clip URL given in the configuration. note that this can break up existing installations
onError event handler is now simplified. It can now only be set for the player and not for clip's and plugins anymore. This handler is always fed with two arguments errorCode and errorMessage as specified in events documentation
fixed cuepoint firing: Does not skip cuepoints any more
Plugins can now be loaded from a different domain to the flowplayer.swf

Improved controlbar

Controlbar has two new methods.

enable method to set the buttons' and widgets' enabled state
widgets method show/hide controlbar widgets

Both of these methods can be triggered at runtime. Combined with events you can disable/enable or show/hide certain buttons during the playback - this is useful for example for advertisement solutions. Look for controlbar documentation for more information.

Improved Forums

On the forums we have a very interesting new feature. You can use a special tag called flowplayer to embed Flowplayer to your forum post. It can be used to show example configurations which can be viewed direcly on the post. In this example a forum user wants to demonstrate controlbar placement on the top of the canvas

<flowplayer>  plugins:  {
    controls: {top: 10}
  }
</flowplayer>

After the post is submitted users will see a working Flowplayer with all the instructions needed to achieve given configuration on their own pages. Look for a live example of this tag! We also have a new manual for "writing beautiful posts with video examples".

Our forums are becoming more active all the time and we are having troubles following each post. This is why we hired one active forum user LiamGooding to help on answering posts. We hope that we can now serve you better. If anyone else is interested on becoming an "active" forum user please drop us an email. This is a possibility to earn some money, too.

Fireunit

While surfing the web I ran into a wonderful testing utility called Fireunit, which is an unit testing extension for FireBug. This is a quite new technology authored by John Resig (developer of jQuery library) and Jan Odvarko. So it was about the time to make a quite extensive test page for Flowplayer. This test can be found here and it is now part of our demo section.

Glimpse of 3.1.0

We have laid down the goals for our next feature release 3.1.0 and here are the highlights for that.

controlbar skinning. the ability to replace default controlbar buttons and styling with a totally different looks. we will have a demo and a tutorial about this where we show how to implement a YouTube- lookalike.
controlbar tooltips. this configuration option let's you set tooltips to each controlbar button. when playhead is seeked you will see the target time on the tooltip same goes for volume slider.
streamin plugin customization. you will have the ability to customize how streaming plugin connects to the server and how video URL's are generated. as an example this proves an ability to setup streaming server clusters or hide the actual video URL being played.
jquery.tools. A JavaScript library I'm been working on. Current tools such as scrollable and overlay will be bundled as a single library - thus making your pages download faster. All tools will be rewritten and some new very generic tools will be introduced. We already have domain http://www.jquerytools.org/ pointing to our site. Again, prepare to be surprised.

Our goal is to release 3.1.0 at the end of February. Before that remember to enjoy your life!