I love FLV’s, always have…always will. I love services like YouTube that support them and serve them up. I love building things that play them, especially being a Koolmoves developer where handling and displaying things like FLV’s is made childs play. Even most browsers have plugins nowadays that will let you download FLV’s if there is one playing on a page you are viewing. FLV is everywhere and I hope that never changes.
For people who don’t code with Actionscript or a Flash enabled authoring platform however, viewing your locally saved FLV’s can be a pain right in the ass. Oh there are shareware apps that let you but I have about as much interest in shareware these days as I do dental surgery and you can damn well bet the nag screens will drive you nuts. The free 500 pound gorilla called Adobe Media Player will play them but as a Adobe AIR developer myself,I can say you will watch he average computer system crawl to a standstill and I personally can’t stand the application. Adobe sees it as promotion for Adobe AIR, I see it as a shining example of why I don’t code wih Adobe AIR anymore.
Anyway…back to my point…..for me personally I just want a simple FLV viewer that lets me watch what I want, when I want. I want to download new videos I want or heard about through the grapevine and watch them using the same app. I want to have fullscreen ability and no commercial ads or uneeded clutter pissing in my cornflakes. I want to cue up some of my favorites whether I have an interet connection or not and just sit back end enjoy….and if I fall asleep I want to feel the comforting glow of the video screen lighting up the room because it looped through my playlist and kept me company without so much as burping.
The problem is what I want doesn’t exist without me spending a few bucks or slogging through shareware or using one that forces me to install Adobe AIR runtime or overcomplicates what I want. There is a solution however. Make my own.
I’m going to take the basic principal from the last post I made on the subject using the Koolmoves media player and it’s new YouTube abilities and expand upon it usng SWF Studio to create a desktop application. It will do what I want….when I want it to and when I’m done I’m going to post if for download so anyone else who feels that it may be useful can get their FLV groove on too. It will search YouTube…download what you like…….let you cue up videos from your downloads and run them in fullscreen no matter if your resolution is 800×600 or infinity and beyond. It will be simple and to the point and it will swallow all the FLV’s you can feed it.
Yeah…….. Koolmoves and SWF Studio are the right choices for this one. No other platforms will do
Above is my latest YouTube search movie utilizing the new PlaylistCreator class by Wilbert Brants. It’s different from my previous YouTube search a couple of posts ago in many ways. My first one had me breaking down the YouTube list of returns manually using string manipulation and extracting and building my own inline xml playlist to send to the mediaplayer. Wilbert has encompassed all of that work into a nifty class and now it’s all handled internally for you with the PlaylistCreator. Like I mentioned before he also added support for Picasa Image gallery searches which I purposely integrated into this movie.
Recently added by Wilbert are two dispatched events. One is a “complete” event and one is an “empty” event. A complete event is dispatched if the search returns results, an empty event is returned if a search resulted in no returns. This lets you code functions to react to each event as needed.
Let’s say you already have performed a search and the mediaplayer is playing the list of returns and you initiate another search while the previous list is playing. Before , if the second search was empty….an empty xml list was sent to the mediaplayer which blanked the screen (because an empty list was sent to the player). Wilberts new version of the class now handles empty returns internally (does nothing instead of sending an empty xml list to the mediaplayer) and dispatches the “empty” event so users can respond programatically with listeners and notify the end user (like my example does). This was a much needed addition and I thank Wilbert for listening.
The movie above is available for download. Users will of course not be able to use it until the PlaylistCreator class is distributed but it will be here waiting. This movie also utilizes the Tweenmax classes.
Unlike large platforms where user feedback and input falls on deaf ears, the creators of Koolmoves (Lucky Monkey) listen and respond…and boy do they respond fast. Wilbert got thinking about that search engine I built using his new YouTube abilities and decided to integrate a YouTube search with his media player. As a added measure he threw in Picasa photo searches to sweeten the deal even more. His own description of the Playlist creator class is as follows:
* The PlaylistCreator class is a helper class for the MediaPlayer component class that allows for an easy way to set a YouTube or Picasa playlist.
The keyword here is EASY folks. With a few lines of code you can populate an existing mediaplayer with content searched by Picasa or YouTube username, by keyword or by both. For example….if I have a mediplayer onstage with an instance name of “mediaplayer1″ and wanted to search for the band Coldplay,I can populate the player in one of two ways:
YouTube example :
var y:PlaylistCreator = new PlaylistCreator();
y.player = mediaplayer1;
y.service = PlaylistCreator.YOUTUBE;
y.q = ‘coldplay’;
y.update();
Picasa example :
var y:PlaylistCreator = new PlaylistCreator();
y.player = mediaplayer1;
y.service = PlaylistCreator.PICASA;
y.q = ‘coldplay’;
y.update();
Following the recent release of the Google AS3 API for YouTube, Bob and Wilbert have added not only support for the AS3 API but also added the ability to load YouTube videos directly to the MediaPlayer component (Shown above). This means you can either call up an external YouTube chromeless player now inside your AS3 based KoolMoves project or use an internal Mediaplayer of your choice. With the ability to skin your own MediaPlayer this means your YouTube player can look like anything your mind can concieve.
Of course I dont have to (but will) mention that none of this would have been possible had Koolmoves not supported AS3. The months of hard work by Bob and Wilbert are really paying off and it’s very cool to see a low cost flash authoring platform like Koolmoves support such high speed API’s.
Wilbert is always kind enough to send me early builds of anything new coming down the pipe and I thank him for that. Koolmoves really is an amazing platform. I’ve always been a Flash user but years ago understood that the cost of Flash is out of the range of the general or casual user so I decided back then to also code using a lower cost platform to help users who want the benefit of Flash without the high cost. Back then I chose Swish and coded tons of stuff using it and some source I made is still out there to be found. Then one day I stumbled across Koolmoves, was immediately curious and purchased a copy. It turned out to be the best single software purchase I ever made. Many times since I have thought of how much fun I would have missed out on had I stayed with Swish and while Swish has a large following it pales in comparison to the power of Koolmoves.
What are you waiting for?….YouTube awaits….get coding!
If you are using Internet Explorer 6, or older. We highly suggest that you seek out an alternative or newer web browser, to bring your web surfing experience up to current standards.
