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Flash Media Playback launches

Posted: 28/07/10

An image of Flash Media Playback launches

Adobe today launched a video player, hosted by them, that you can embed on your website to play your own videos through. If you want video delivered to Flash Player on your website/blog but have neither the time or the inclination to learn ActionScript 3.0, then this is probably what you're looking for!

Flash Media Playback requires no knowledge of ActionScript to use, and is built on the powerful Open Source Media Framework - affording it support for all of the latest video delivery methods available to the Flash Platform. It even supports the loading of dynamic OSMF plug-ins, so you could use a third-party ad platform like Videoplaza in your player, or a CDN like Akamai to deliver your content.

The embed code for basic use of the hosted FMP SWF is as follows:

<object width="470" height="320" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/

swflash.cab#version=10,1,53,64">

<param name="movie" value="http://adobe.com/..pathTo/FlashMediaPlayback.swf"></param>

<param name="flashvars" value="src=http://myserver.com/mymovie.flv"></param>

<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>

<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>

<embed src="ttp://adobe.com/..pathTo/FlashMediaPlayback.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="470" height="320" flashvars="src=http://myserver.com/mymovie.flv">

</embed>

</object>

As you can see, very little in the way of mark-up is required to get up and running with a video on your site, but you can take things further if you wish... FMP has a customisable user interface, allowing you to tweak the appearance of the player on your web page. Do to this, you supply a config XML file to the player through the flashvars parameter:

<param name="flashvars" value="config=http://myserver.com/FMPConfig.xml"></param>

[code]

You then need to modify and host the following XML document on your server:

[code]

<config>

<src>http://myserver.com/mymovie.flv</src>

<streamType>liveOrRecorded</streamType>

<loop>false</loop>

<controlBarPosition>bottom</controlBarPosition>

<scaleMode>none</scaleMode>

<backgroundColor>BF2900</backgroundColor>

<optimizePlayback>false</optimizePlayback>

<initialBufferTime>0.2</initialBufferTime>

<expandedBufferTime>12</expandedBufferTime>

<minContinuousPlaybackTime>28</minContinuousPlaybackTime>

<plugin

src="http://anotherserver.com/plugIn.swf">

<metadata id="http://www.osmf.org/plugin/metadata/1.0">

<param name="value1" value="cdata"/>

<param name="value2" value="metadata present"/>

<param name="alert" value="true"/>

</metadata>

</plugin>

</config>

Whilst a little more work to do the config, you start to see how customisable both the functionality and presentation of the hosted Flash Media Playback SWF can be... and all the while you haven't had to touch a line of ActionScript code! The other great thing is that Adobe have provided a web interface for you to configure your FMP player, which can be accessed at http://www.osmf.org/configurator/fmp/

My esteemed OSMF friend Greg Hamer has also written a great article about getting set-up with FMP, which is available at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/video/articles/fmp_player.html

Find our more about what Flash Media Playback can do

Keywords for this post: flash media playback, flash, video, fms, fmp, adobe, osmf