April{"Wed",16(2008)};

Video Player

A designer friend of mine wanted a custom flash player built for the videos he has on his website. I used Degrafa to create the curved background and layered progress bar.

Features:

• Accepts an XML playlist that specifies other videos that can be chosen via a menu
• Displays progress of video playback and buffering in same bar
• Scrolling menu to choose other videos
• Popup volume-picker that intelligently goes away (unlike Youtube’s current one
• Advertisement slideshow while video is buffering (also from XML)
• Debug mode to check if any of your external files failed to load

Issues:

One thing I ran into that I didn’t see mentioned anywhere is that Degrafa expects SVG data to start with M and end with z.  Some of my data- exported straight out of Adobe Illustrator no less- didn’t have this and simply wasn’t showing up.

My error-checking is definitely lackluster. There are countless files referenced in the lifetime of the player (main video, xml playlist, other videos, preview pictures, thumbnails, ads, etc. I’ve done minor checking to prevent explosions, but there are definitely times where you’ll see a broken image symbol if you linked to an invalid or inaccessible image.

<degrafa:Path id="playPath" data="M0,0 0,14 12.5,7z" fill="{greyFill}">

I hate VideoDisplay’s buffering- it offers little customization. On my internet connection the player works fine, but for some people with slower connections, it will play, buffer, play, buffer, etc. I tried a number of the different schemes (analyze size, download speed, etc.) to figure out when you can safely start playing the video so that you can play it straight through…none of them worked well on eratic network connections. I also hate how when a video is buffering, the VideoDisplay locks itself down, ignoring pause and play commands.

View Source etc. will come eventually…

Elroy Online | Remote Viewing

*This post is a placeholder…I don’t intend for anyone to actually see it other than myself at the moment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Degrafa, Flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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