Google Analytics Support for Externally Embedded Players Created Dec 19, 2008

not possible at the moment. this would need JavaScript on the embedding site. the only way to do this is to provide a custom embedding code that supports this.

+1 on this feature. This feature is really the only thing that is holding us back at http://www.streetfilms.org from switching to Flowplayer. We have a demo with flowplayer up at http://design.streetfilms.org/ and everything is working well.

The player we currently use allows us to pass a "callback" flashvar that hits a php file on our server whenever anyone plays an FLV file. This file does the stat tracking for our embedded films.

not a bad idea. this is a 3.1 thing. our rough TODO list for the new version can be seen from our newest blog entry

http://flowplayer.org/blog/15

BAH Was just about to post something to this effect.

Anyway in _theory_ the following would work fine.

1) two scripts media.php and ga.php
2) ga.php takes a $_GET arg which contains the information you want to pass to GA
3) ga.php is protected via HT access to only allow access from your local server's IP address
4) media.php is a pseudo streaming script that serves the media file, at the top of said file include a simple fopen() or curl() request to ga.php

A hefty work around yes BUT will work with any player you wish to use ^_^

BETTER YET if you use jQuery

(NOTE: UNTESTED SEE:http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/load#urldatacallback )

...
onLoad: function() {

$().load("/path/to/file");		

},
onUnload: function() {

$().load("/path/to/file");		
}
...

Note I am still getting my head around jquery, but using the player embed calls of onLoad and onUnload you _SHOULD_ be able to make a jquery ajax call to ANY page

UPDATE: ... assuming of course the embed code passes this information?

I guess cosborne's issue here is that javascript cannot be used because it's an embedded player.

Yes that is exactly right. Javascript cannot be used because it is an embedded player.

So you're saying, Javascript cannot be used because it is an embedded player.

Yeh sorry thought it was funny seeing the exact same text 3 times ... VMWare must of driven me mad today

Since it's this workaround, or don't use FlowPlayer, I suppose it's worth a try...

Our client is very interested in this question, too. I'm just starting to try out Flowplayer, though, so please forgive me if this question is moronic. Could a Flash plugin be used to hit the tracking script on the home site?

Not sure if this is at all good Action Script, but I hacked something together that works for my use case:http://bitbucket.org/anil/flowplayerpingback/

This plugin will post a video_id and a secret (that can be hard coded) back to the server whenever clip #1 is played. The server can then record this information.

Any feedback appreciated.

Hi Anil, thanks for your post! I'm completely new to flash. We too need a pingback function so I downloaded your script. I managed to get flowplayer compiled following the instructions on the site, and I got the control bar plugin compiled. I need a little help with your script. First, where does it get the video id? Currently we have to supply a url to flowplayer and not the id in our database. Aside from that, I just cant get it to compile. I copied the build.xml from the control plugin and edited it as the instructions suggested, and this is what I get.

C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.pingback>ant
Buildfile: build.xml

build:
[echo] ++ flowplayer.pingback.swf +++
[echo]
[echo] checking if flowplayer.pingback.swf is uptodate
[echo] main up-to-date: ${uptodate.main}

prepare:
[unzip] Expanding: C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.devkit
\flowplayer.swc into C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.pingback
\build

compile:
[echo] compiling with
[echo] compiling with
[exec] Loading configuration file C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flex3sdk\fra
meworks\flex-config.xml
[exec] C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.pingback\build\fl
owplayer.pingback.swf (1126 bytes)

build:
[echo] ++ flowplayer.pingback.swf +++
[echo]
[echo] checking if flowplayer.pingback.swf is uptodate
[echo] main up-to-date: true

prepare:

compile:
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer
.pingback\build

example:

BUILD FAILED
C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.devkit\plugin-build.xml:184:
The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.devkit\plugin-build.xml:29: T
he following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.devkit\plugin-build.xml:176:
The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.devkit\plugin-build.xml:180:
The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.devkit\plugin-build.xml:162:
C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer\build not found.

Total time: 3 seconds
C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\flowplayer\flowplayer.pingback>

I have written a plugin that uses google AS3 analytics libraries to tie flowplayer directly into google analtyics without any javascript.

It uses the following syntax in the embed:

"analytics": { "url":http://yourhost/flowplayer.analytics-3.1.3.swf","google_id":"YourGoogleID", "debug: true" }

The debug parameter is optional and defaults to off. If debug is set to true, the output from the analytics calls will be displayed over your video but not actually sent to google.

your google web property ID must be set to a valid id.

The plugin will report events for, PLAY, PAUSE(time), STOP(time), SEEK(time), RESUME(time), and FINISH. The (time) means an additional piece of data, the location of the event in seconds, will be sent with the event notice to google. The clip URL is also sent as the label of the event.

I don't have the plugin hosted yet, but would be happy to have it integrated into the flowplayer project if there is interest. The licensing on the google analytics library is Apache 2.0, which is compatible to be used IN GPL3 projects according to apache:http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html

Let me know your thoughts and interest on this.

Hi mediamobz,

I'm really interested with the plugins that you wrote. Can you please share it with us?

Thank's before

Hi mediamobz,

I'm really interested with the plugins that you wrote. Can you please share it with us?

Thank's before

I don't mind sharing...is there an appropriate place here for sharing plugins?

If you email me the files I can put up a link here to them on my server. I'd love to look at them as well.

yes we also can provide the mirror for your plugins.

Could you please send me your plugins to admin@sdm-tv.com?

Hi Mediamobz,
We're looking for something like this too? Is your plugin up somewhere yet?

Hi Mediamobz,
we're also looking for this plugin functionality.
This will be very useful for us.

Thank you

I went ahead and figured this out, I couldn't wait. Here's a link to the plugin and source:

http://www.flwoutdoors.com/GoogleTracker.zip

It's a 3.1.3 plugin, and should work with either regular or commercial flowplayer. Call the plugin like this:

plugins: { gatracker: { url: "/path/to/flowplayer.GoogleTracker.swf", google_id: "UA-xxxxxxx-x", debug: false} }

Where the google_id is your Google ID. If debug is true, the plugin won't send tracking info to Google but will instead draw what it would have sent over the video.

This tracks onStart (start(1)), Play, Pause, Stop, and Finish. Also replays (start(2)). It fires two events for each, just because of the way I needed to use it. You could pretty easily modify the source and recompile to do whatever you need it to. Just be sure to have the analytics.swc in your flexdir's /frameworks/libs directory when you compile.

This also works when compiled into flowplayer, so you can compile all of the options right into the flowplayer.swf file for embedding, which was the original problem on this thread.

If the embed code includes the parameter "AllowScriptAccess=always" then this movie will also report what website and page it's embedded into. Note that this site tracking won't work for Myspace, which changes the AllowScriptAccess to "never" when you embed it. Oh well, can't win 'em all.

Hope it's useful for you.

I've compiled the player with the Analytics and OpenAdStreamer plugins. However, Analytics only sends the initial start and not the finish, pause, or additional plays from the streams in the OpenAdStream plugin. Any thoughts on capturing those events from the OpenAdStreamer for Analytics.

Mediamobz hasn't been around for months, which is why I had to figure it out on my own. I wouldn't mind seeing what he'd done just to make sure mine is as optimized as it can be.

I haven't used the OpenAdStreamer plugin, but I'd guess that it isn't using the same event calls as the regular player. You'd probably want to call the event tracker directly from OpenAdStreamer when it fires those events. If it's firing alternate events, you could just add those to the ones GoogleTracker is listening to. Unless it's firing public events, the GoogleTracker won't know about them.