I’ve used the JW Player flash player for lots of projects now. It’s free, customisable enough and has a lot of documentation, plus community support, to help when something isn’t working right.

I ran into an issue during my latest project however where JW Player was working fine in Firefox but on Internet Explorer I was getting a blank area where the video should have been appearing.

The Solution
It turned out the path to my swfobject.js was not valid. I was previously using:

<script src='/js/swfobject.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

In order to get the player to work in all browers I needed to change my code to either:

<script src='js/swfobject.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

Or:

<script src='http://www.mydomain.com/js/swfobject.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

See how the path to ‘swfobject.js’ is either relative or absolute, rather than referring to the root? After making the above amendments it worked perfectly across all browsers.