Question

I have a video that I need to immediately start playing when my page has loaded (that’s the easy part).

I can also set the video control bar to ‘auto-hide’ but I’d like it to be initially invisibile because it looks really messy on top of the video as it starts.

(I also my own buttons corresponding to ‘sections’ in the video but I’d still like people to see a progress bar if they rollover).

I’ve tried looking at both JWPlayer and Flowplayer and both have auto-hiding control bars, but they both display on startup.

Is there a way to not initially show the control bar in either of these players – or some other player?

Answer 1

OK I found the answer for JWPlayer :

From here

Add “controlbar.idlehide”: true as a flashvar

var player = jwplayer("ANIM_INTRO1").setup(
    {
        flashplayer: "/content/jw5.4/player.swf")",
        file: "test/FULL-VIDEO.f4v",
        streamer:  'rtmp://flvstream.example.com/cfx/st',
        autostart: true,
        height: 242, width: 555,
        "controlbar.idlehide": true,
    }

This appears to be fairly recent addition as I also found some earlier posts (in the same thread) complaining this wasn’t possible – with code to patch the source.