Flash methods (play and pause) do not work

[tforster]

This is a great plugin and is working well for us in development at the moment. However, one minor issue I've noticed is that the play() and pause() methods don't work against the Flash player. We are encoding just H.264 files and use mediaelement to support HTML5 or Flash for current Firefox and non-HTML5 browsers.

A new development involves a playlist with a click on a video thumbnail in the list to start the video playing in the main player window so .play() will be really useful.

[johndyer]

Could you show me how you're using the play and pause methods? In an updated version, I'm also making those methods public on the MediaElementPlayer object which might make it easier.

[tforster]

When the user rolls over the video when it's not playing a strip of thumbnails is displayed along the bottom just above the scrub bar. The opacity and background colour are the same as the scrub bar so it looks like it's part of the player controls.

The strip of thumbnails represent a playlist and a click on any of the thumbnails should load and play the associated video. I can toggle playing of HTML5 H.264 videos but not Flash H.264. I'm using $("video")[0].play() and $("video")[0].pause().

This is on my local dev server so I don't have an exposed endpoint that I can open right now otherwise I would invite you to see it directly.

[johndyer]

Unfortunately, there's no way to make the browsers work quite like that. Here's the syntax you should use:

// create the player object explicitly, not via jQuery().mediaelementplayer()
var player = new MediaElementPlayer('myvideid');

// call methods on the internal media object (you can leave off the .media in the latest code)
player.media.setSrc('mynewvideo.mp4');
player.media.load();
player.media.play();

Hope that helps!

[tforster]

John, thanks for replying so quickly. It's greatly appreciated. I will try your code tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, when you say there's no way to make the browsers work like that do you mean the browsers or the (flash) plugin? If I open a webkit console on your mediaelementjs.com page and execute $("video")[0].play() it starts the video. Correspondingly a .pause() halts it.

[johndyer]

I mean there is no way to get $("video")[0].play() to work in all browsers the same way since they don't support the same features.

Since webkit supports native H.264 playback, $("video")[0].play() will work. However, on IE8 which doesn't support the [video] tag $("video")[0].play() isn't available, and on Firefox which can't play H.264, $("video")[0].play() will fail.

[tforster]

Do'h! It's clear now. I'm still referencing the video element not the resulting mediaelement object :) It was a long day yesterday.

Thanks John and thank you for an awesome plugin too.

[johndyer]

Feel free to re-open this if you need to.

[clemmonsmc]

Using the above method, I am still unable to play an H.264 video on Firefox via a click method. Is the behavior I am see unexpected?

Here is my code:

var vp = new MediaElementPlayer('#video-player');
var tp = new MediaElementPlayer('#tour-player');

$('div.tabs ul.tabNavigation a[href="#video"]').click(function() {
   tp.pause();
   vp.load();
   vp.play();
});

$('div.tabs ul.tabNavigation a[href="#tour"]').click(function() {
   vp.pause();
   tp.load();
   tp.play();
});