In JW 8.28.1, we've updated hlsjs and corrected a floating bug.

New Feature

• HLS.js (hlsjs) has been updated to ver. 1.4.10.

Bug Fix

• When using setFloating, the float functionality now works during ad breaks.

With the release of JW 8.28.0, new features include adding a showAdMarkers property for ad display control, improvements to playlist filtering (except when doNotTrack is enabled), and new accessibility shortcuts in JWP. Bug fixes address video resizing in Safari and a Freewheel capability flags issue.

New Features

• A new property called showAdMarkers has been added to the timeSlider configuration object, allowing ad markers to be displayed or removing them and introducing a new ad countdown element that appears 5 seconds before a mid-roll (as shown in the release note image above).
• The source asset has been filtered out of the Recommended playlists. If doNotTrack is enabled in the browser, no filtering occurs.
• JWP supports new accessibility keyboard shortcuts to increase caption size (+) and decrease caption size (-).

Bug Fixes

• Videos display correctly resized on both desktop and mobile versions of Safari.
• An issue related to properly adding custom capability flags for Freewheel has been addressed.

With today's release, we've enhanced playlist previews and improved JSON validation in the JWP dashboard.

New Feature

In the JWP dashboard, playlist configuration pages show promoted content in the playlist preview.

Bug Fix

In the JWP dashboard, the player configuration page validates the format of the edited JSON code.

Service release. No new features. 

In this release, we've added support for #EXT-X-PROGRAM-DATE-TIME and Google Analytics 4. We also fixed several bugs pertaining to inconsistent arrow key behavior, floating player activation, and incorrect time display.

New Features

• Both HLS and DASH manifests support #EXT-X-PROGRAM-DATE-TIME. See getAbsolutePosition and absolutePositionReady.
• Google Analytics 4 is supported.

Bug Fixes

• The inconsistent behavior with the left arrow key and DVR streams on Chrome and Firefox has been fixed.
• Our floating player is no longer activated during PIP mode.
• VOD content that displays as live during casting has been fixed.
• The seek bar displays the correct time when clicking play without briefly showing an incorrect time.
• VPAID ads no longer play at 100% volume when the player is set to volume: 0.
• The addCues property has been fixed to add cues to the time slider correctly.

In this latest release, we're introducing a fresh chapter bar redesign as the default view and fixing various issues.

New Features

• Our chapter bar redesign has been set as the default view.
• Chapter tracks display correctly when using the duration config option.
• In-manifest captions appear as intended when the starttime value exceeds 0.
• The Outstream player has been updated to play audio-only ads.
• The autopause functionality works when floating is set to never.
• Caption positioning has been improved.
• On desktop, the default floating behavior no longer appears at the top right.

With 8.26.8, various UX and ad improvements and a fix have been released.

New Features

• Floating player will now float up (previously only floats down) in portrait mode on mobile.
• Picture in Picture (PiP) icon can now appear in the control bar on mobile.
• Added a new ad macro for video duration named integer-duration that returns an integer.
• Removed the ability to go fullscreen during an ad with the Freewheel plugin.

Bug Fix

• Fixed an issue causing clickthrough to be blocked on certain VPAID ads.

With v8.26.7, we've updated our HLS.js dependency version in addition to several other updates and fixes.

New Features

• Updated our HLS.js dependency to version v1.2.9.
• Updated the logic of autopause to prevent the autopause event from firing when player would go into floating.
• Updated our player element to use classes instead of IDs in some instances to prevent duplicate IDs in the DOM.
• Added additional adWarnings when the VMAP schedule is missing schema elements.
• Updated our CEA 608 positioning to be centered aligned.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue causing the preview thumbnail to crop at the edge of the player.
• Fixed an issue where our liveTimeout setting defaulted to null.

With v8.26.5, we've enabled the ability to resize the player on Tizen, removed the timer on DVR live streams, and addressed several player issues.

New Features

• Enabled the ability to resize the player on Tizen.
• Investigated and added the aria attribute to wherever it may have been missing.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue causing ad pods to not surface the skipoffset in our VAST plugin.
• Fixed an issue that caused the playlistitem event to fire twice when the setPlaylistitemCallback is present and the playlistitem is dynamically changed.
• Fixed an issue with our VAST plugin that blocked clickthrough functionality on certain VPAID creatives.
• Fixed an issue with casting on customer receivers where setting the appid did not work with DRM.
• Fixed an issue with navigation on the settings menu on Tizen when audio tracks were rendering with caption tracks.
• Fixed an issue causing the player not to rotate between landscape modes in fullscreen on Android.

Deprecation

• Removed the timer on DVR live streams as scrubbing backwards would show negative times.

In this release, we've added the ability to pass parameters into the ad request for FreeWheel and corrected a caption selection issue.

New Features

• FreeWheel global parameters (afid, sfid, vcid) can now be passed into the ad request through the Freewheel plugin.
• You can append additional FreeWheel MRM ad server capabilities to the `flag` parameter and pass them in the ad request through the Freewheel plugin.

See our FreeWheel ad break recipes for examples of how to include these new parameters. 

Bug Fix

• On iOS mobile web, caption selection is no longer impacted after exiting full-screen mode during live streams.