Forum user: rmerch

So where to begin, I have been having trouble with this for a very long time and was about to give up on the whole idea. Just to give you a rundown on what I wanted to do.

1. I have a video player that has several clips on the same time line.

2. When the video reaches the next clip, a flash animation plays before the next video starts.

3. Each clip has its own colour.

What I wanted to do was set the colour of the flash animation to the colour of the clip. The animation was a simple swipe across the screen, like a curtain being drawn.

To embed the animation in the player, I am using the loadPlugin function. I tried several ways to pass the colour to flash. Setting in in the JSON calls and as a query string. I had no luck with the JSON calls as i had no way of knowing how the loadPlugin embeds the flash of where it was located. Normally you can look at the source file and see the embed content but there was no reference to the flash animation I was loading.

So I decided to look at getting the value from the query string.

The call to the loadPlugin flash contents looks like this:

myflow.loadPlugin("swipe" + current, playerPath + "plugins/swipe/swipe.swf?" + colours[current % colours.length]

colours is an array of colours.

To get this value in flash, I used the actionscript code:

1. Get the url that called the flash content: var url = this._url;

2. Then get the parameter, in this case the hex value:
var paramPosition = url.lastIndexOf("?");

3. Then we take that parameter and store it in a variable:
var param = url.substring(paramPosition + 2, url.length).toLowerCase();

I add 2 in order to remove the ? and # from the parameter. Flash uses the 0xffffff format.

4. Because I was using this variable in several places in the flash time line, I set it as a global variable:

_global.colourHexValue = param;

5. Now I had to set the colour of the flash elements. To do this I had to make each element a moveclip and set an instance name for eack movieclip. I then use the folowing code to set the colour:

var setSwipeColor = new Color(swipe);
setSwipeColor.setRGB("0x" + colourHexValue);

I hope this helps someone.

The problem was that the video had not loaded and the stop buffering function cleared the buffer. I wanted the user to be able to stop the video from playing but still continue to buffer the video.

The solution was to check the video state as I was doing anyway and if the state is <=2 (unloaded, loading, buffering) then use the stop function. If it is >= 3 use the pause function. This seems to work fine, although I have not tested this thoroughly yet.

At present I am loading flash content over my video everytime it reached a certain part of the timeline. using the code below:

myflow.loadPlugin("swipe" + current, playerPath + "plugins/swipe/red.swf",
{
bgcolor:'#FEFE33',
top: 0,
left: 0,
width: 790,
height: 293,
zIndex: zindex
}

As you can see I am only loading one swf file (red.swf). What I want to do is make it more dynamic by loading a swf file with a white background and pass the background colour each time I load the flash plugin.

I have tried passing in the background colour in the url to the swf file like this: plugins/swipe/red.swf?bgcolor=#ffffff but this cause the plugin to fail.

Does anyone know how to get this to work

Thanks

Looks graetn not sure if they have that feature. I have searched the site for the past 4 weeks and haven't seen any feature like this. This feature would be really handy though.

Have a look at ffmpeg as they have a function to extract thumbnails.

This sound very simple in theory but i'm having a lot of trouble getting the flowplayer to compile in Flex Builder. Infact i'm having not luck at all. I do not know where to start. I have read through the Flex SDK but not sure how to apply this to flex build.

Any ideas

Thanks

I had quite a lot trouble with this feature. I had a playlist and wanted to load a thumbnail of each image before the video plays. After a lot of stress I decided to use the javascript api.

The first steps I took was to load the images into the cache. I then used the content plugin to load the relevant image over the video. To hide the image I would check the state of the player. While the video was loading, I would show the image. As soon as the status changed to playing, I would hide the image using jquery. Its a bit long winded but It meant that the my player was more dynamic.

Alternatively if you have only one video on the page, or a single video per player, you can use and <img /> tag inside wher you create the player.

ie

<code class"html"> <a style="display:block;width:520px;height:330px" id="player"> <img src="path to your image"/> </a>
If your flowplayer config is set to autoplay false the image will be present till someone clicks on the image.

Hope that helps

Does anyone know how to compile the flash controller plugin with flex. I was going through the SDK route but found that Flex builder has everything already bundled together.

I have managed to download the src from the flowplayer svn repositories but that's where I get stuck.

Has anyone ever tried or done this before. Your help will be much appreciated.

I would like to be able to pause a video while it is buffering but this does not seem to work.

I decided that I will check to see if the video is buffering, if it is I then stop the buffering and pause the video which worked fine. The issue I have now is restarting the video. When I press play again, I also restart the buffering using startBuffering() but this does not seem to start the video playing even though the getState() tells me that the video state is playing

i have read that the stop buffering clears the whole buffer but I can not see why this would not allow the video to play back when you restart it.

Can anyone help