When developing software for multimedia Internet kiosks there was a necessity to playback FLV-files using a player built into a web page. Opportunities to create a fast and lightweight FLV-player based on standard Flash-components caused a large number of such players to appear in the Internet. In practice such solutions mostly were either simple and non-flexible or way too expensive (despite for the fact of being “free” – a part of the players came along with truncated functionality and offered buying a complete version for $XX).
Moreover, one of the core issues was the absence of an external API at the most of the suggested players. In other words, we could not adequately control video playback from the outside of a Flash application as for example with the help of Java script placed on a web page. Moreover, this function is imperative considering the passion of most of customers for creations of their designers and the skepticism in regards to interfaces born by creative minds of off-the-shelf players’ developers
Therefore, when the necessity for creating a simple FLV-player supporting progressive video upload for a multimedia terminal came up, it was decided to create such a player which would not only support a built-in user interface but also had a basic API to manage playback via Java script.
Certainly, a web developer should have an option to hide the standard user interface (skepticism towards interfaces born by creative minds of developers apparently is related to the interface born by our creative mind as well). Considering the above-mentioned and after several days of coding, our own video player came to life. The player was written in Flash 8, AS 2.0.
It has been decided to open the source code as well as to publish the list of features, which are not yet at place but will certainly go out soon. In our immediate plans is porting the application to the 9th platform and ActionScript 3.0.
The Key features:
- Options for progressive video upload in FLV format from a local file via HTTP or streaming server.
- Un-pluggable built-in user interface (forward/rewind buttons, playback control, progress bar and current position label)
- External API to manage playback and receive events from the player via Java script.
- Dynamic size change with keeping the position of control elements.
- Flexible settings.
- Open source code.
To-do’s:
- Optional video positioning (considering the progressive upload)
- Scaling with keeping the screen proportions
- Play list
- Vector Flash-skinning based on SWF libraries.
What you can do having the source code at hands:
- Easily modify built-in control elements
- Create something interesting and of course useful (but please refer to our authorship for the initial code)
What you can not do having the source code at hands:
- Delete references to our authorship
- Distribute the product without the source code.
About author:
Mikhail Pieson, Master of Mathematics and Informatics. Leading Flash developer, expert in Adobe Flash technologies, Ruby on Rails and image processing
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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 6:05 am and is filed under Flash, Video.
