Connecting Projector to JW Player takes three things from your JW Player account and a handful of decisions you make once in Projector: an API key and secret, the ID of a web player, and a privacy level you choose on purpose instead of by default. After that, Projector can upload your finished videos to JW Player for you.
This guide is for the person who owns the pipeline. You might be a producer who renders customized video in Templater, a developer wiring a data source to a hosting platform, or an agency lead who needs to know what to ask the JW Player administrator for. We will walk through whether JW Player is the right destination, what to collect before you open Projector, which settings matter and why, and how to tell whether a run worked.
Decide first whether JW Player is the destination you want
Projector can deploy to three streaming services: Vimeo, Frame.io and JW Player. You can authorize more than one of them and pick a service for each payload. A payload is a collection of one or more missions, and a mission is one job inside it. The limit to remember is that a single payload goes to a single streaming service. You cannot send the same payload to two of them.
Dataclay’s help site describes the three in different terms. Vimeo is user-friendly and consumer-focused. It suits people who are new to customized video, who produce fewer than 1,000 videos at a time, or who only produce video occasionally. Frame.io is aimed at large-scale video producers and is useful when teams need online hosting for the approval process. JW Player is designed for enterprise-level video producers: broadcasters, publishers and others for whom video is the main business. It offers a high level of personalization and white label options, and the help site calls it a great choice for video production houses, large corporate users and anyone who regularly produces a high volume of customized video on a consistent basis.
Read that as a description of the audience, not a ranking. If you produce video only now and then and nobody needs a white label player, the help site points to Vimeo as the easier fit. There is also a plain money fact. JW Player does not offer free accounts. If you plan to use it, you buy and set up an account first, following the directions at jwplayer.com.
So the first decision comes down to a short list of questions. Does your company already pay for JW Player? Do you need your own branded web players on the videos you deploy? Is the volume steady enough that an enterprise platform makes sense? If the answer to the first two is yes, the rest of this page applies directly. If you are starting from nothing, read the comparison of Que and Projector and the Projector overview before you buy anything.
One more constraint decides where the work happens. Projector is an installed application, and you must run it on the same computer where you use Templater and where Templater stores its output files. That machine is the one that does the uploading.
Gather three things in JW Player before you open Projector
Projector asks you to authorize your JW Player account, and the exact clicks for that live in a separate help topic called Authorize Projector for JW Player. Follow it when you get there. This article covers what you should have in hand so that step does not stall while someone hunts for a password.
An API key and secret. You must have an API key to use JW Player with Projector. If your JW Player user has Admin permissions, you can create one yourself. If not, you need to ask your account administrator for a key and secret. In the JW Player Dashboard, go to Settings, then API Credentials. In the v2 API Credentials section, click Add. For Name, enter a value that makes clear what the key is for, such as Projector. Choose a User Role from the drop-down, then click Add New API Key.
A name such as Projector tells whoever reads the credentials list later what the key is for. A vague name does not. Choose the User Role deliberately rather than clicking through.
A web player ID. JW Player lets you create one or more web players with your own branding and preferences. Those players are used when viewers stream your videos from the JW Player platform, and you can embed them in your own site or other sites. To use an existing player with Projector, open the Players page in your JW Player account, find the player you want and copy its ID. If you do not have a web player yet, you can create one. JW Player’s own documentation covers that.
Because the player carries your branding, choose the one that matches the campaign rather than the first one in the list.
The name of a playlist, if you want grouping. Projector can place each deployed video in a JW Player playlist. You enter the playlist name in the Streaming Globals section. Decide the naming before the run. A playlist called Spring Mailer is easy to find later. A playlist you meant to name afterward becomes homework.
If the person who runs Templater is not the person who administers JW Player, send that administrator one short list: the API key and secret, the ID of the branded player and the playlist name. With that list in hand, authorization is a single sitting.
Choose the settings Projector applies to every video
Once the account is authorized, the decisions that shape the viewer’s experience sit in Streaming Globals. These are default settings for everything you deploy to a streaming service, and you choose whether to apply them to each payload. The steps vary by service, so what follows is the JW Player-relevant set from the help site.
Privacy. You choose one of three levels as the default. The first, “Anyone can access this video,” makes the video public, so anyone with the link can view it. The help site notes that if you are producing personalized videos you may not want everyone to see every video, and it does not recommend this option. The second, “No one except the owner can access this video,” is recommended as the best default. It lets you play the video through, confirm everything is right, and stage videos before a marketing campaign. When you are ready, you change the privacy on the streaming service itself. The third, “Only members of the platform can access the video,” lets any user of the streaming service view it. It resembles public, it requires the viewer to belong to the service, and it is not recommended for personalized videos.
The reasoning is simple. A personalized video can carry a name, an account detail or an offer meant for one person. Publishing it publicly by default is the wrong direction to fail in. Start private, check a sample, then open the ones that should be open.
Poster. A poster is the still image that promotes the video on the streaming service, also called a thumbnail. You have two ways to set it. You can create a poster image in Projector and choose the exact frame, which Dataclay strongly recommends so the image is a personalized, attention-grabbing frame. Or you can enter a Poster Time in seconds, and the streaming service pulls the frame at that timestamp. If you made a poster image in Projector, you can leave Poster Time blank. If you enter a value anyway, it acts as a backup in case something goes wrong with the poster image. If you leave it blank and made no poster image, the service uses the first frame of the video.
There is a trap here, and the help site names it. You have to know how long your customized videos are. If a video runs three seconds and you enter 3.5 seconds, the service falls back to the first frame. When your videos differ in length, a single timestamp misses some of them. With lengths of 1.5, 1.75 and 2.5 seconds, entering 2 gives you the intended frame only on the third video. If your batch has uneven durations, build the poster in Projector and treat Poster Time as insurance.
Titles and descriptions. You can set a unique title and description for each video from the Projector interface using tokenization, and this works for JW Player, Vimeo and Frame.io. That replaced the older approach. The stream-title and stream-description columns or keys in your data source are no longer supported for this purpose. If an older spreadsheet still has those columns, move the wording into tokens.
Transcoding for the platform. Projector has a built-in transcoder that you configure per payload. For a video headed to a streaming service, the help site singles out H.264 (the codec the MP4 format uses, optimized for streaming) and AAC audio, because most streamers require audio in that format, at the recommended audio bitrate of 128. For 30 FPS web video on a computer monitor, video bitrate should generally fall between 3,500 and 6,000 Kbps. Our overview of Projector covers the rest of the transcoder.
Streaming services do not use GIF clips, so create one only if you plan to promote the videos in social posts, on a website, or in email or text campaigns. If you do create one, archive it as well.
Run it, read the status, and know what to do when nothing happens
With the account authorized and the settings chosen, Projector needs a data source. It supports QUE or Google Sheets, one per payload. The same source can carry a project from Templater through to Projector, so you do not maintain two lists. If you use Google Sheets, two columns are always required: render-status and stream-status. With QUE, Projector writes its data as sub-properties under one required JSON key named stream. For a QUE source you choose either all ready jobs or ready jobs in selected campaigns, then optionally filter by ID or date created. Read the Que page if you are deciding between the two sources.
A Google Sheets detail is worth planning around. Google authorization expires after seven days. Projector signs you out automatically and prompts you to authorize again. Plan for that re-authorization.
Next, switch on Projection. In the Projection section, enter a number of seconds in the Check every field and click Enable. Projector polls your data source on that interval for new jobs and acts on the settings you configured. Once enabled, it keeps running until you disable it. When it finishes deploying a mission, it writes metadata back to the data source from the streaming service, the storage service, or both. Our saved help page does not list the exact fields, so check your sheet or QUE record after the first run to see what arrived.
The stream-status value tells you where each video is. Dataclay’s own list of stages follows. Pending means the video is waiting to be picked up. Staged means the output is prepared for upload. Transcoding means the file is being converted for delivery. Deploying means Projector is uploading to the provider. Onstream means the video is deployed and live and accessible. Error means the deployment failed. The fuller walk-through is in how a render becomes a live video. The useful habit is to run a small sample first, watch a single row move from pending to onstream, open it in JW Player, and confirm the player, the privacy level, the poster and the playlist all came out as you decided.
Mission Control shows each mission’s status graphically, and you can screenshot it to show a colleague where a batch stands. A slider at the bottom sets how many of your processing cores Projector uses. The default is half of the available cores. If rendering slows down or RAM usage climbs, drag Number of Workers to the left and click Save.
The troubleshooting note the help site records for deployment is one you should know in advance. If Projection says there are no missions to deploy, check whether you selected Enable AEP rendering in the Export pillar. If you did, make sure you did not also select a video file asset extension when you configured the data source. Those two settings cannot be used for the same project.
If you archive finished videos, the storage service must be an S3 bucket in an account you provide. You must set archiving up if you told the payload to archive posters or GIF clips. Otherwise Projector skips archiving completely and ignores those settings.
The bottom line is that JW Player is a good Projector destination when you are already a JW Player customer who needs branded players and a steady stream of customized video. Collect the API key and secret, the player ID and the playlist name first. Default the privacy to owner-only, build the poster in Projector, use H.264 with AAC audio, and send a small sample before you turn Projection loose on the whole list. If you do not have a JW Player account, the help site suggests Vimeo for occasional producers. Start with the overview of Projector, then decide.
Quick answers to the practical questions, drawn from Dataclay’s own documentation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a paid JW Player account to use Projector?
Yes. JW Player does not offer free accounts, and Dataclay’s help site tells you to follow the directions at jwplayer.com to purchase and set up an account if you plan to use it. Projector connects to an account that already exists. It does not create one. You also need API access, so someone with Admin permissions has to create an API key and secret for you if your own user cannot.
Where do I find the API key and secret for JW Player?
If you have Admin permissions, open the JW Player Dashboard and go to Settings, then API Credentials. In the v2 API Credentials section, click Add. Give the key a name that shows its purpose, such as Projector, choose a User Role from the drop-down, and click Add New API Key. If you do not have Admin permissions, ask your account administrator to create the key and secret and send them to you.
How do I choose which JW Player web player Projector uses?
Go to the Players page in your JW Player account, find the player you want, and copy its ID. That player carries your branding and preferences when viewers stream from the JW Player platform, and you can also embed it in your own website. If you do not have a web player, you can create one first. JW Player’s documentation explains how to do it.
What privacy setting should I use for personalized videos?
Dataclay recommends “No one except the owner can access this video” as the default. It lets you play the videos through, confirm they are right and stage them before a campaign. When you are ready to release them, you change the privacy directly on the streaming service. Public and platform-members-only settings are not recommended for personalized videos, since you may not want everyone to see every video.
Can one payload send videos to JW Player and Vimeo at the same time?
No. You can authorize more than one streaming service and choose which one each payload uses, but you cannot send videos to multiple streaming services in the same payload. If one campaign needs two destinations, split it into two payloads. The help site also suggests separating missions into different payloads when some of them need different settings, such as different poster or transcoding choices.
Why does my poster show the first frame instead of the one I chose?
The likely cause is the Poster Time value. If you enter a time longer than the video, such as 3.5 seconds on a three-second video, the streaming service uses the first frame. When videos differ in length, one timestamp cannot fit all of them. Create a poster image in Projector so you pick the exact frame yourself, and keep Poster Time only as a backup. If you leave Poster Time blank and make no poster, the service also uses the first frame.
How do I know a video reached JW Player?
Watch the stream-status column in your data source. A video moves from pending to staged, then transcoding, then deploying, and ends at onstream when it is live and accessible. An error value means the deployment failed. Mission Control also shows each mission’s status in Projector. After the first run, open the video in JW Player and confirm the player, privacy level, poster and playlist match what you chose.
