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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T20:36:00+00:00

We’ve currently developed an ExpressionEngine site (php), and are using a paid JWPlayer to

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We’ve currently developed an ExpressionEngine site (php), and are using a paid JWPlayer to display video uploaded by the client.

At present we’re running into a number of issues, as the client is:

  1. Uploading video at the wrong size
  2. Uploading video randomly in both flv or mp4 format

And the player is chugging along terribly with multiple pauses throughout the video – sometimes buffering the entire clip before it is played.

I know FFMPEG can be installed serverside, but I’m not sure of the way in which to go about this, and how it might interact between ExpressionEngine and JWPlayer. I’m also not sure about the formatting – the ability for this automated encoding process to also crop/resize the video to suit the player dimensions on the site.

We would really like to have the videos playable on all browsers & iOS devices.

A HQ option would also be great where applicable, but it’s just a nice to have – as we’re struggling with the formatting / encoding issues first and foremost.

Any help figuring out the best process, and what tools I might need would be greatly appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’d reccomend using a service like zencoder

    I’ve used them in the past and no matter what video format I’ve thrown at them it works great. (PS. I’m not affiliated with them at all)

    There is a PHP API with a whole lot of resizing, quality and format options. After you’ve uploaded your video you can send it to zencoder and they’ll send you a response some time later with success or fail.

    They can put the processed video on Amazon S3 or FTP it to a server.

    You’ll need a HTML5 player for iOS devices though, unless JWPlayer has come a long way since I used it last.

    You could get zencoder to output in mp4. and then you still only need mp4 for JWPlayer/flash and the HTML5 version for iOS, as long as your happy to use flash for all desktop browsers there’s no problem.

    As far as the buffering issues you are having – I have found that using a CDN version of the swf for JWPlayer (or whatever player you are using) has caused it to load the entire video file before playing. Easily fixed by hosting it yourself.

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