web help

Thomas J. O'Hara

Thomas J. O'Hara

Senior Citizen
hey guys, i'm getting a new site made for myself and I really want flash video on it.

the basic idea is you click a link and the flash video pops up in its own player.

an example - www.722.org click on "view current message"

notice how the video starts immediately and you can drag the cursor left and right on the timeline and it doesn't take any time to rebuffer.

any flash gurus out there who know how this is done?
 
Well the entire site is built in flash, it's not just a flash video dumped on top of an html site.

I'm guessing upon the mouse click some actionscript called a new scene where the BG darkens and the video + player appears.
 
right, my designer is making my site in flash too. she's not an expert on video so i'm trying to help her out. but unfortunately i don't know anything about web stuff.

the basic idea is i'm going to have a blank tv set with a list of icons to the right of it. when you click an icon, the video will pop up in the tv. i like the effect where everything else darkens, but i'm not really concerned with that...mostly just about how to get the videos to play back with nice quality and speed.
 
Thomas I did this last summer for a site, but had to trudge through it all as I had no clue what I was doing to be honest. It would be hard to say exactly what I did, but I could send you my flash file if you want to let her look at it. The site is at www.amsiweb.com (click on video and the video loads). My files are Action Script 3 so she'd have to be in Flash CS3 to work with them I think. PM me your email and I'll send the project file over to you.
 
i see, it works well. the only thing is there's no bar at the bottom of the video to scroll through. I just discovered i probably have to stream the video from a flash media server. You know anything about this?
 
If you want your users to be able to jump around in the video, don't use streaming video - that requires buffering. You want to do progressive download, for which you do not need flash media server. You can use any old server, as long as the MIME types are configured to serve up FLV video. I have done this before for a server at work - can't remember exactly how I did it, but I found instructions using Google and it was pretty easy.

I suspect that the video in the "View current Message" pop-up is downloading in the background while the site loads. That's how you can move back and forth across the timeline without waiting too long. The bar is a function of the flash video player skin... I trudged through all of this myself for my own site a while ago - www.willclegg.com - all the info is out there. If I hadn't developed this site almost 3 years ago, I would offer more specific detail, but I just don't remember everything anymore.
 
Hi Thomas, you'll use flv videos. It's not that hard to implement as everything is done for you through the FLV mechanism. I'm sure there are a few documents that come with Flash that help you set this up. This is (unfortunately) what I do to pay the bills... :)
 
cool, that's reassuring. I have done a ton of reading in the past 2 hours, so i feel like i actually know what's up now.

isn't the internet amazing?
 
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