Updates

Core Player

• Added a new property to meta events, metadataType, which indicates the type of metadata available in the event. Possible values are: media, program-date-time, id3, date-range, scte-35, and unknown.
• Added a new event metadataCueParsed which is triggered once the metadata cue point is buffered.
• Exposed CUE-OUT, CUE-IN, and DATERANGE SCTE-35 metadata tags that are parsed in an HLS manifest. When a metadata tag becomes active, the following SCTE-35 meta events are fired: #EXT-X-DATERANGE, #EXT-X-CUE-OUT, and #EXT-X-CUE-IN.

Localization

• Added automated localization support for Hebrew.
• Added new localization options and updated all automated localization files to include translations for “Mute,” “Unmute,” and “Exit Fullscreen” icon tooltip texts and ARIA labels.
• Changed the default English localization text for slider from “Seek Slider” to “Seek” to reduce screen reader redundancy.
• Improved readability, punctuation, and string concatenation for all right-to-left languages, including Arabic and Hebrew.

Accessibility

• Added screen reader support to announce the video position changes when using the left and right arrow keyboard shortcuts while not focused on the timeline element.
• Added screen reader support to announce volume changes when using the up and down arrow keyboard shortcuts while not focused on the volume slider element.
• Improved volume keyboard accessibility by separating the mute icon from the volume slider. Now, when a user tabs to the mute icon, hitting enter will mute or unmute the player. Tabbing out of the mute icon, the volume slider will appear and can be controlled. Tabbing out of the volume slider will hide the slider and move focus to the next focusable icon.
• Fixed a bug causing the volume slider to be read as a “left-right slider” when it is actually an “up-down slider.”
• Added a blue focus ring that appears around any focused element when accessed by keyboard, which improves focus visibility.

Advertising

• Improved ad rendition selection in Freewheel by passing the player’s bitrate estimate to the AdsManager.
• Added a new bidding configuration option, no_vpaid_ads to the optionalParams object, which restricts VPAIDs and only serves mp4 ads with no SpotX VPAID wrapper.
• Added pause reasons to the response for on(‘adPause’) in the VAST, IMA, and Freewheel clients.

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue where loading an HLS stream via load API does not display the selected captions track, though it is shown as selected in the UI.
• Resolved an issue in which alternate audio tracks may not be detected for HLS streams when no video codec is specified in the manifest.

Advertising

• Fixed an issue where the player fell back to the very first standalone ad in an ad tag even if there is a standalone ad directly after a pod item. This occurred in cases where the "fallbackOnNoAd" attribute is set to true and the pod item failed to play.
• Fixed a bug in the VAST client causing some VPAID ads to throw a Javascript exception when an ad completes playback in Microsoft Edge.

Updates

Core Player

• Improved handling of cross-origin 360/VR videos in Chrome 70 and Safari 12 so that instead of displaying a blank screen, the player errors with a new 307012 code.

Advertising

• Ungated VAST 4.1 tags, enabling ad tags marked with the latest VAST version to play. VAST 4.1 features that are not yet supported in JW Player will be ignored.
• Added automated localization of all Google IMA text to match the player’s language. Developers may also declare a two-letter ISO language in advertising.locale.

Fixes

Core Player

• Addressed uncaught TypeError that occurs when provided double value for currentTime property on HTMLMediaElement is non-finite.
• Fixed an issue where the error screen was still present after calling .remove() when the player experienced a setupError.

Advertising

• Fixed an issue in Google IMA where content did not background load during a pre-roll on an autostarting player.
• Fixed broken countdown timers in some ads when vpaidcontrols was set to true.
• Fixed a bug in Freewheel causing the adPlay event to fire twice on mobile devices.

Updates

Core Player

• Increased contrast ratio of the quality level label when “Auto” is selected.
• Changed focus behavior so that focus remains on the fullscreen icon when entering and exiting fullscreen.
• Improved responsive scaling of the shelf widget when using the selector configuration option to decouple the width of the player from the width of the widget.

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue causing header logos to be pushed above the viewable area on JW Showcase sites.
• Fixed an issue in Safari that caused duplicate captions tracks to appear in the menu of a small player (<320px wide) when switching captions in a live HLS stream with embedded WebVTT captions.
• Fixed an issue where players in iframes autostarted out of the viewport when autostart: 'viewable' was set.
• Fixed an issue with paused DVR streams in Safari where the player would seek to the live edge when a viewer scrubbed to a specific position.
• Fixed an issue where pausing and resuming a live stream with 708 captions would cause the captions to no longer be in sync with the video.
• Fixed an issue where parsing an hls manifest containing an EXT-X-MEDIA tag with no URI would result in an error, though this is spec compliant.

Advertising

• Fixed an issue with ad frequency rules in the VAST and Google IMA plugins causing audio from a playlist item to play over the next playlist item when used with the playlistItem() event.
• Fixed an issue in Google IMA where an exception was thrown when an ad times out in an ad pod.
• Fixed an issue in Freewheel where the duration property was not being passed to the Freewheel SDK.

Updates

Core Player

• Added more granular DASH and HLS playback error codes.
• Added specific error codes for cases where an attempt to start playback fails.
• Reduced player setup errors by extending the setup timeout from 30 to 60 seconds.
• Created a new warning event that displays messages in the developer console, alerting developers of non-fatal errors.. Note: Documentation updates about these changes are coming soon.
• Updated the name of the Chromecast button component from button to google-cast-launcher to reflect changes made by Google to be compatible with React.
• Added a new configuration option, displayPlaybackLabel, which adds click-to-play call to action text below the play icon on the idle screen. Testing has shown a 3-5% lift in clicks to play with this feature enabled. The default text is “Play” and it can be customized or translated in the intl block with the playback option.
• Added non-fatal, console-logged warning events and error codes. See our Errors Reference for updates.
• Added a new div, which wraps the player's existing DOM structure, in order to make way for upcoming features.

Localization
For more information on the release note below, please see the Configuration Reference and the support article on how to translate player text with automated player localization.

• Added support for players to automatically translate tooltips, ARIA labels, and headings into 14 different languages, based on the language attribute declared in the HTML tag on the page. If the lang attribute is not present, the viewer’s browser language will be used, and a translation will still be provided if available. For a full list of languages supported and to request support for another language, please see the support article.
• Introduced a new object, the intl block, which accepts an array of objects of ISO language codes. Each language object accepts all the localization strings previously used in localization. Going forward, developers are encouraged to use the intl block so that a single player can be used across pages localized in any language.
• Added 12 new localizable strings, which includes “link,” “auto,” “off” and more, as well as updated the default values for a few existing strings. All hard-coded strings are now mapped to localizable strings.
• Moved the following fields into the intl block so that they can be localized by language: abouttext, advertising.admessage, advertising.cuetext, advertising.loadingAd, advertising.podmessage, advertising.skipmessage, advertising.skiptext, related.autoplaymessage, sharing.heading. These fields will be backward compatible with their original locations, but will not take advantage of the automated player localization features for those fields. All fields should be nested in the intl block as written.
• Moved localization.related to related.heading within the intl block. In a localization context, related is now an object nested inside the intl block.

Advertising

• Removed the auto-exit fullscreen functionality when using IMA with skippable ads, now that iOS 12 allows the video element (and thus the skip button to) work in fullscreen instead of the native player.
• Decluttered the seek slider by removing cue markers for non-linear (banner overlay) ads.
• In the VAST plugin, added support for the following attributes in the ad tag wrapper:
  • fallbackOnNoAd – selects any stand-alone adwhen set to true and the response contains no ad.The default is false.
  • followAdditionalWrappers – ignores wrappers received in the response when set to false. The default is true.
  • allowMultipleAds – only allows stand alone adswhen set to false. The default is true.

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue where VP9 streams would not play in Edge.
• Fixed a bug causing the player to error when it was set up after zone.js, a third-party script.
• Eliminated a javascript exception thrown when failing to load the player bidding script.
• Fixed an issue where it was difficult to differentiate between the text decoration of selected and hover states for items in the settings menu, causing confusion about which option was selected.
• Fixed an issue present in IE 11 on Windows 7 where viewers were unable to mute HLS content with the Flash provider.
• Fixed an issue causing some 608/708 captions from HLS streams to render successfully.
• Fixed an issue causing an expired license key error on mobile devices in rare cases where the page is opened, but Javascript is not executed until hours or days later.

Advertising

• Fixed an issue in Freewheel where a "Loading Ad" message would appear when an ad was not loading.

Updates

Core Player

• Rotating an Android device with a control-bar only (audio) player or when controls are disabled will not cause the player to go into fullscreen mode.

Advertising

• To make the player more resilient, if IMA erroneously clears the video tag when trying to resume playback from an ad, the player will try to recover by attempting to reload the item source.

Fixes

Captions

• Fixed an issue where the captions menu was not being cleared when switching from a playlist item with captions to one without captions.
• Fixed a captions issue where the last line of captions did not disappear at the correct time.
• Fixed an issue where natively rendered captions text did not scale correctly when entering fullscreen mode in iOS 11.4 and iOS 12 (beta).

360 (VR) Video

• Fixed an issue affecting some Android devices where the video view could not be controlled when moving the device.
• Fixed an issue where the video view would pan erratically or appear jittery during playback on some devices.
• Fixed a bug where adding a pre-roll before 360 content causes 360 functionality to be disabled.

Service release.

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue causing players to fail to set up on websites using zone.js.

Updates

Advertising

• Expanded the on(‘adsManager’) event, which fires when the ad manager is loaded, to IMA. This event can be used to integrate with third-party vendors.

Fixes

Advertising

• Fixed an issue on iOS where tapping on an IMA ad was treated as a right click.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where closed captions were cut off in Android Chrome browsers for portrait and full-screen playback.

Updates

Core Player

• Added a new recommendations interface, the shelf widget, which will place a recommendations shelf directly below the player, outside of the player’s container by setting related.displayMode to shelfWidget.
• Added a new startTime configuration setting for playlist items that will instruct the player to begin playback of the media at the time specified.
• Added multiple channel support for EIA-608 Captions (CC1, CC2, CC3, CC4).

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue where a duration property with an empty string was being passed to the getPlaylist API getter.
• Fixed a bug where some casting icons would inherit the page’s button styles.
• Fixed an intermittent issue causing 'Cannot Load M3U8: 400' errors in HLS live streams.

Ads

• In IMA, fixed an issue with SpotX not loading when requireJS is used to instantiate a player.