Archive for the ‘ video ’ Category

The ultimate video player – as3

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.

Flash 10 Sneak Peek looks promising

I just had the time to watch what was presented in the MX Chicago 2007, apparently much.. hmm, Adobe’s 3D api looks attractive, I guess using intrinsic classes is shorter (20 lines?!) and easier to migrate than the current 3rd party packages, and according to this vid, the performance will be great.Next-sneak-peek.jpg
I am also exited about the Advanced Text Layout Support coming in version 10, take a look at this vid, thanks again Aral. After years of neglecting RTL languages (that is Right To Left writing direction – Hebrew and Arabic), and countless crippled hacks that never really worked – finally a solution seems to work good.RTL-flash.jpg
And this makes me very happy.
3D-transform-flash.jpg

Flash, a dominant video platform

The last Adobe Flash Player update, (Aug 21, codenamed “Moviestar”) integrates H.264 video and High Efficiency AAC audio codecs, as well as multi core support and full screen mode with hardware scaling.So flash will soon deliver HD quality videos, good news : )Flash is probably the best video platform today, as it combines the customizable interactivity of flash scripting and advanced streaming and playing abilities.The recently updated YouTube player is a great example, developing the video playing experience by improving the most difficult part – selecting the video out of the endless inventory without too much effort by the viewer. In the new player when the video you watched is over, relevant videos are offered, very aesthetically and in the same location, without visiting the flickr website or even leaving the page. nice.YouTube new player interface:youtube_interface.jpg

Hello? is this flash video on my phone?

mobile_flv.jpgAdobe announced in the 3GSM Congress that the next release of Flash Lite™ (Flash for mobile phones & devices) will support Flash Video (FLV), to be available in the first half of 2007 – that’s really soon!This means the same video we view with our browsers will soon be viewable with our smart phones, making the FLV a dominant standard for delivering streaming video content to all devices.This also means future potential in terms of the smart phone’s User Interface, giving another strong incentive for implementing Flash Lite in the phones, also holds a possible answer to Apple’s iPhone User Interface coolness factor, as flash also allows really cool stuff. hmm, good news for flash developers.