I took over a Drupal 7 project building a web application for college students to upload original videos about their school, and for schools to manage, group, and share the videos.

It's a startup privately funded by the principal, and we are literally working on a shoestring. My previous experience with media in Drupal led the principal to contact me via LinkedIn.

When it came time to build a video playlist in Drupal Views for JW Player version="6.7.4071" (formerly known as Longtail Video), I found very little useful documentation. In fact, someone suggested that those who know how are not interested in sharing their knowlege. -- but not me 

There are a couple of videos on YouTube by Bryan Ollendyke for Drupal 6. But a lot has changed in Drupal since then.

The Goal:

Back to the playlist: Site admins can mark a video featured by ticking a checkbox on the custom video content type. Now I want to display those featured videos as a playlist.

JW Player provides clear documentation about how to embed the player, and how to construct and load the playlist via a RSS feed.

The structure of the RSS file:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:jwplayer="http://rss.jwpcdn.com/">
<channel>
<item>
<title>Sintel Trailer</title>
<description>Sintel is a fantasy CGI from the Blender Open Movie Project.</description>
<jwplayer:image>/assets/sintel.jpg</jwplayer:image>
<jwplayer:source file="/assets/sintel.mp4" />
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

There are various threads on drupal.org discussing video playlists for JW Player. None of them were particularly useful for me.

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