JW 7.3.0 is now in beta and is reported to include the following feature:

Native HTML5 caption tracks now utilized for iOS devices, allowing for fullscreen subtitles

A lot has changed with JW Player since my previous post regarding it’s lack of support for captions on iOS – including a complete rebuild!

That was back in November 2013 and related to JW Player 6.7.

Over two years on and the latest version of JW Player is 7.2.4, but unfortunately, one thing that still hasn’t changed is it’s ability to provide caption support for media played on iPhones and iPads in fullscreen.

Whilst my original post was useful in demonstrating the principle of how JW Player captions can be enabled for iOS use, it was by no means a complete solution – there are a number of other scenarios/states which need to be handled, and it also does nothing to account for cross-domain/CORS issues or to style the captions as suggested by the JW captions configuration block.

Introducing the JW/iOS captions plugin

Not wanting to leave things half finished, I decided to create a plugin to provide a more robust solution – whilst making it easier to implement.

The JW/iOS captions plugin offers the following features:

  • Overcomes basic cross-domain issues
  • Honours the JW captions block styling configuration
  • Uses native captions on iPhone and iPad in fullscreen.

An example of how to use this plugin can be found at the following page: Enabling JW Player captions on iOS

Tatami for Online Video

If you are using Tatami for Online Video to build and generate your JW Player embeds, this plugin will automatically be included when your player is rendered on iOS.

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