[thelist] Flash based QuickTime media player ?

[John Dowdell]

Steve Bissonnette wrote:
> I¹m looking for a Flash MX script/fla/tutorial that will allow me to ...
> * Load an external MOV (local)
> * control that loaded MOV (play/pause/volume/etc.)
> * possibly resize to-fit (I can use PHP to get the current dimension of the
> MOV and pass that to flash)
> The end effect is to have a generic QT media player that can play any movie
> ³passed² to it.

I'm not sure on this... it sounds like you want to use Apple's QuickTime 
Player (presumably in a browser), but have the user interface controls 
in a Flash file, presumably in the same browser page...?

If so, then that could get tricky quick, because the various browsers 
still haven't converged on inter-process communication... towards 
Netscape 3 there was LiveConnect, which changed its APIs a few years 
ago, and which was announced awhile back as changing a third time, 
possibly with support from Opera and Apple... Microsoft has always had 
its own ActiveX Scripting approach, although only on its Windows 
version, naturally. Getting stuff to talk together in a page still 
requires a lot of browser-specific tweaking.

Do you have to use .MOV format and QuickTime codecs? Reason I ask is 
that it's super-easy to do "AJaX"-style stuff with video through Flash, 
invoking new videos without refreshing the page. The pause/play 
transport controls are simple too. And with the improved On2 codec 
already tracking at 50% consumer viewership (as well as the previous 
Sorenson codec tracking above 95% consumer viewership), you'd impose 
fewer audience hassles than with other video architectures.

Is it possible to compress to FLV format, rather than MOV? That could 
make the whole project dramatically simpler to fulfill....

(If it's *got* to be MOV, then you might consider putting the QT in its 
own frame and just refreshing that frame when a new video is chosen, but 
the transport controls could still be a tricky thing to handle in that 
kind of situation too.)

jd




-- 
John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA
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