There are many video players in flash out there, lots of them are open too, I’ve found few tutorials out there giving everything you need to know to code a video player. few of them work really nice and heavily distributed (JW Player), others have cool UI, few considered proper integration of keyboard control, most of them don’t. yet none of them has it all. none of the player I saw had the right touch.
So I decided to take the challenge and make a code only (no library assets), lightweight video player, with elegant UI that works as you would expect it to, with keyboard control (starting with play/pause, forward/backwards jumps, the fundamentals, the musts). also fullscreen mode and moving between the screen modes by double clicking a la VLC (which is my favorite video player on the Mac), and of-course buffering.
At the moment the features are:
• Keyboard control: play/pause (space bar); jump backwards/forward (left/right);
• Volume control affecting the volume while pressing and moving cursor;
• Fullscreen-normal by double-clicking the video or dedicated button;
• Single click on the video toggles play/pause;
• Display of position and total duration;
• Clickable progress bar, a click will jump video to position.
• Control bar will hide when mouse leaves stage.
• File size is 20.8k (!!)
Credits:
The architecture was inspired by Mr.doob’s player, but I replaced his video controller with the excellent FLVPlayer by Martin Legris, and added my own touch and flavor :)
Suggestions are more than welcome, tell me what you think!
Update: I was working on improving the player behavior across platforms and browsers, discovering that events behavior is different on IE from the ret of the browsers. Surprising ha? MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT added to the stage is not firing on IE, you have to add Event.MOUSE_LEAVE, it still works for the rest of the browsers. This actually solved several oddities on IE, people are still using it? really?!
Update 2: I added spinning loading animation when video is buffering, and moved the duration text to be next to the position text, I guess it is easier for the eye this way.