A Joomla Plugin to Easily Embed Brightcove Videos

Large corporations don’t typically use YouTube to host their videos, they use something else, something like Brightcove. The reason why they do that is because Brightcove is a paid video hosting platform, which means that they can get support if they run into problems, and they can hold the company (Brightcove) accountable if something goes wrong (unlike free video hosting services, where you get the service as is).

For those corporations that embed Brightcove videos on their Joomla websites, we have excellent news for you! We have created a Joomla plugin that will allow you to easily and reliably embed Brightcove videos on your website. But, why are we providing this plugin? Isn’t embedding Brightcove videos as simple as pasting some JavaScript into the HTML source code of a content item?

Well, yes, but the problem with Brightcove videos is that the JavaScript gets messed up if you toggle the editor from HTML view to source code view (or vice versa). No matter which Joomla editor you use, when you toggle the view, the object tag gets modified to include the following:

data="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"

and the following additional parameter will be added:

<param name="movie" value="" />

This results in the corruption of the embed code, which means that the video will no longer display on the Joomla website. The reason why this problem happens is a core JavaScript functionality that is common to all Joomla editors. That functionality (wrongly) assumes it’s a good thing to modify the embed code to include the above.

Now, if you use our plugin, you will protect any Brightcove embeds you have on your Joomla website from these changes, because the code that you will use to add Brightcove videos will be as simple as the following:

{brightcrove|width|height|playerID|playerKey|videoPlayer}

With the exception of brightcove in the code above, all the fields are dynamic and are self explanatory. The value of these fields can be found in the embed code of your Brightcove video. For example, to generate the following embed code on your Joomla site:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://admin.brightcove.com/js/BrightcoveExperiences.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<object id="myExperience987654321" class="BrightcoveExperience">
	<param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" />
	<param name="width" value="500" />
	<param name="height" value="300" />
	<param name="playerID" value="123456789" />
	<param name="playerKey" value="ABCDEFGHIJ" />
	<param name="isVid" value="true" />
	<param name="isUI" value="true" />
	<param name="dynamicStreaming" value="true" />
	<param name="@videoPlayer" value="987654321" />
</object>
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
	brightcove.createExperiences();
// ]]></script>

You will need to add this to your content item:

{brightcrove|500|300|123456789|ABCDEFGHIJ|987654321}

And that’s it!

The plugin is available for free (under the GPL License) and can be downloaded from here. The plugin is written for Joomla 2.5 but should also be compatible with Joomla 3.x (we haven’t tested it).

Please note that this plugin is provided “as is”, and, although we completely trust our code, we cannot be held accountable for any direct/indirect issues the plugin may cause on your website.

If you want support for the Brightcove Joomla plugin, then please contact us. Note that our super affordable fees apply.

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