Sticking with JW5. Version 6 a big disappointment.

Bought JW Player 6 and after extensive testing haven’t used it. It is much more difficult to customise skins for playlists and has less player setting options.

While JW6 Premium gives the ability to remove the logo 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.

There is an obvious move away from users who simple want a robust 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.

The pricing structure is another big change and 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 it’s a huge disappointment and a step backward for me.