Big disappointment

Version 2.x is a major update to the plugin which has removed certain functionalities that are not supported any more in JW Player 6. These functionalities made JW Player 5 far superior to JW Player 6 for the one-website-non-commercial user.

After extensive testing with 2.1.1 I haven’t been able to implement Jw6 on my site the way I could with 1.7.2 using JW5. It is much more difficult to customise skins for playlists and has less player setting options.

With all versions of JW6 they’ve introduced a JW player text link if you right-click on any video. To remove it you have to manually add some tags to each of your WordPress shortcodes. Upgrading from version 5 means going back on all previous videos for the past couple of years and adding these tags if you want to remove the JW link.

It also depends on what type of user you are. There is an obvious move away from users who simply want a one-website-self-hosted video player. It’s fine to move towards analytics, encoding and hosting if you don’t
leave behind your one-website non-commercial user. Jeroen from longtailvideo states in another post that “basic video playback of an MP4 will become straightforward as HTML5 gains full adoption”. That may be true but I, for one, was a loyal user of JW and wouldn’t have even considered looking for an alternative until JW6.

As Morten Ross says in his review above the plugin is expensive as a premium version and the pricing structure has also changed which is another big disappointment. The May survey of customers on pricing was totally slanted towards an SaaS hosting content model with pricing based on a set number of site and monthly plays. This is another reason
why I will be keeping abreast of other players for when it’s eventually time to move on from JW5.

Some features which were “deprecated” in JW5 are being re-introduced such as horizontal volume sliders and <enclosure> but all-in-all version 2.x (up to 2.1.1 when this review was posted) of this plugin imcorporating JW6 is a huge disappointment and a step backward for me.