[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by vbboarder

Since you're thinking about redoing the code for the player pages, can you consider using either the Shadowbox or LightWindow media viewer?
The presentation of both the standalone and embedded players are not user friendly like that of the JW flv & wmv players. The standalone player requires a new window, which is against users' preference of no popups, and the embedded player requires a new page load, which is time & resource consuming. The JW players are user friendly because users can view videos on category's entries listing pages without requiring popups or page loads. The Shadowbox & LightWindow would create a more user friendly interface.

Both the Shadowbox & LightWindow are similar to Lightbox, but for videos - they can display Windows, Quicktime, & Flash videos. They can even show entire web pages, forms, image galleries, & PDF's. There's 2 main differences between those scripts. LightWindow is MIT licensed so it's freely available; however, it's dependent on the Prototype & Scriptaculous libraries. On the other hand, Shadowbox is licensed under the Creative Commons Noncommercial_Share-Alike license so it's free for personal use, but $20 for commercial use; however, it's much more flexible with required JS libraries - you can use the author's custom JS library, Yahoo YUI, Prototype, jQuery, Dojo, etc. In my experience from trying both media viewers with the Image Resizer mod, I found that Shadowbox is more compatible with vBulletin than LightWindow - ie: it can show images in posts, profiles, groups, albums, and even LDM!
You can find out more about the media viewers at:
Shadowbox: http://mjijackson.com/shadowbox/
LightWindow: http://stickmanlabs.com/lightwindow/#why

Thanks for considering.

I will certainly consider these. Web presentation of videos has moved on quite a lot since 2004, when the players were originally coded. I think that a javascript based approach is the right way to go at the moment.

However, there are limits to the time I have available for this work and each new feature added is one more item to support. This is a particular problem when there are several interdependent pieces of software which are not under my own control - there are not many good people like you who are willing to devote time to debugging and documenting.

So the short answer is, I'll see what I can do, but I'm not going to commit to anything at this stage.