moodle-filter_jwplayer

This is Moodle filter that allows using JW Player for playing HTML5 and flash content. The filter is designed to achieve consistency of the player appearance in all major browsers and mobile platforms. The player supports flash fallback, providing more devices and formats coverage than either HTML5 or flash can handle alone. The filter also supports RTMP and HLS streams.

Installation

There are three stages of installation that include JW player installation (optional), filter installation and filter configuration.

The filter does not include JW Player libraries due license limitations. You are supposed to make sure that JW Player libraries are available either by installing them locally, or configuring filter to use the cloud version of JW Player. In either cases the first step would be to register on JW Player website https://account.jwplayer.com/ and accept terms and conditions. Once this step is done, you have a choice of using cloud version (hosted by JW Player) or download the self-hosted version of the player and unpack it to ./lib/jwplayer/ directory in Moodle (that is where filter will be looking for it in case you will select self-hosted option in the filter settings). Using cloud version is recommended by JW Player, for full comparions see this page.

The filter installation is pretty strightforward. Filter files need to be placed in ./filter/jwplayer directory inside Moodle, then you will need to go through installation process by loggining in as admin.

The last step is to configure the filter. After the installation, the plugin configuration page will be shown (alternatively you may access it via Site Adminstration -> Plugins -> Filters). You need to specify whether you use self-hosted or cloud version of JW Player. In the latter case you would need to specify aditionally, whether player libraries will be accessed using secure connection (https) and the "Account token", which you may obtain from your account settings page on JW Player website. Account token is essentially the file name from cloud-hosted player code, e.g. for script path http://jwpsrv.com/library/ABCDEF012345.js the corresponding account token that needs to be entered in the settings field is ABCDEF012345. For the self-hosted option, depending on your organisation type, you may specify the license key taken from account settings page on JW Player website.

You may also choose the file types, for which player will be used in the filter settings page.

Once the filter is configured, the final thing to do would be to enable the filter on Manage Filters page in Site Administration area and move it above "Multimedia plugins" to give it higher priority.

Usage

Any multimedia content added to moodle using the HTML editor, either using the link or via media embedding dialog, will be played using JW Player if the format is supported and enabled in the config. For more details on supported formats see this page (ignore YouTube section) on JW Player website.

Note for developers

The filter extends core_media_player class, which allows it to use the same neat approach to embed JW Player as used for other players in the core.

The filter can easily be extended if required, so that you may use JW Player for other type of media, e.g. rtmp streams, and making it handle some perculiar data source that require some modifications and extra parameters passed to JW Player (e.g. if you want to use it for your custom media server). For inspiration, below is the filter.php content needed for handling RTMP from your server:

class filter_luflashmedia extends filter_jwplayer {
    /**
     * Replace link with embedded content, if supported.
     *
     * @param array $matches
     * @return string
     */
    private function callback(array $matches) {
        $result = '';
        $mediaserver = 'rtmp://your.server.com';

        // Check if we ignore it.
        if (preg_match('/class="[^"]*nomediaplugin/i', $matches[0])) {
            return $matches[0];
        }

        // Get name.
        $name = trim($matches[2]);
        if (empty($name) or strpos($name, 'http') === 0) {
            $name = ''; // Use default name.
        }

        // Split provided URL into alternatives.
        if (strpos($matches[1], $mediaserver !== false) {
            // Special treatment for RTMP.
            $urls = core_media::split_alternatives($matches[1], $width, $height);
            $result = $this->renderer->embed_alternatives($urls, $name, $width, $height);
        }

        // If something was embedded, return it, otherwise return original.
        if ($result !== '') {
            return $result;
        } else {
            return $matches[0];
        }
    }
}