New hulu styled open source video player.

by jphillips on Oct. 29, 2008, under Flash, Ruby, video
Comments so far:3

Just created this open source video player styled like hulu.  It’s adapted and rewritten code from: http://chrisbrimelow.com/blog/?p=15 .  Some of the changes I made were pretty basic including separating the ui from some of the nitty gritty stuff that drives the video.  There’s also file streaming capabilities built into the player.

To take advantage of streaming video, I’m running nginx with flv-streaming-module compiled into my install.  Seems to work pretty well and handles tons of connections simultaneously.

Source code on github for this video project is located here: http://github.com/elguapo1611/opthumb-videoplayer/tree/master

Initialization phase of flash player in browser

by jphillips on Oct. 27, 2008, under Discovery, Flash
Comments so far:0

Just thought I should share a little experience I had with embedding flash content on webpages.  If you’re application has a dynamic width and height (IE. You are sizing your content based on the size of the embed), you need to listen for Event.RESIZE to initialize your application properly. Here are a couple of implementation issues I’ve had with dynamically resized apps:

  • When you embed with Javascript, the stage size directly after load is 0×0.  IE… stage.stageWidth = 0 until the javascript kicks in and stretches the layout properly.
  • When you are not using javascript to embed flash content, the stage size is implemented properly if the .swf hasn’t been cached by the browser.  I ran into this issue where the flash file would implement the stage properly the first time.  However, when visiting the same flash page again, the stageWidth and stageHeight would start out as 0.

By adding a stage listener to detect resizes, issues of rendering the interface based on stage properties can be avoided.  I should mention that both cases of rendering the page on load and on resize must be implemented to avoid edge cases.

Chapters in video

by jphillips on Oct. 27, 2008, under Flash, video
Comments so far:0

When uploading a video to a site, there’s definitely use for keyframe images as previews.  I was thinking about using the nginx streaming-flv module to feed up individual frames of a video, but I concluded that exporting the required frames as pngs or jpegs is way more practical.  Once again, I’m using ffmpeg to grab individual frames from an flv and xport as pngs.  Heres the code:

ffmpeg -i awards.flv -vcodec png -vframes 1 -ss 120 -an -f rawvideo -s 320×240 testoutput.png

  • -i: the input video
  • -vcodec: the output codec.  In this case png
  • -vframes: the number of frames to output.  I only want 1 frame as the image
  • -ss: number of seconds into the video to grab the screen-shot
  • -an:
  • -f: for the format of the video
  • -s: size of the output
  • testoutput.png is the name of the resulting image.

E4X isn’t perfect but improvements have been made.

by admin on Sep. 14, 2008, under Flash
Comments so far:0

Just tried filtering states using Actionscript 3′s new E4X xml schema.  If you try filtering your xml nodes based on Attributes, you can run into issues if the attribute lists aren’t consistent among sibling nodes.  By placing your code in try-catch statement to prevent any messyness.  IE…..

try{

_xml.datapoints.data.(@state==”NY”);

}catch(e:Error){

trace(“error occured”);

}

Crossdomain Bitmap Loading

by admin on Sep. 9, 2008, under Discovery, Flash
Comments so far:0

Trying to load a bitmap crossdomain without the correct policy file.  Because of this, I can’t access the bitmapData within the loaded document which makes scaling the photos look horrible.  I’m going to try loading the ByteArray and translating it directly to a bitmap.  However, I’m not sure if this gets around the crossdomain issue.

update:

So…. loading the bitmapData as a byteArray using the netStream class seems to work.  I’m going to do a little load testing to see how fast this method is before proceeding.  Here are some resources:

update:

Although at first glance the previous solution seemed to work, it looks like I am still unable to use bitmapData.draw() on the display object that’s created.  I wrapped the some console logging around each step of the conversion process and it looks like everything goes to crap at: oBitmapData.draw(oSource, oMatrix) where oSource is the loaded file in a Loader class that I have forced a type convertion on.  The struggle continues.