Subscribe now and choose from over 30 free gifts worth up to £49 - Plus get £25 to spend in our shop
This is a very long story so I'll cut to the chase.
Basically, we have loads of ways of streaming FLVs using cutomisable players built into webpages etc, but ... is there a way of taking a FLV video, building a simple (seek/play/pause/volume) player into it, and then publishing as FLV?
Or can anyone here do that?
Cheers
.FLV is a video format - it's just that it is specifically designed to be used from a Flash container.
I think you are asking is there a Flash movie player that will play .FLV movies? If so, have a look at Flowplayer (www.flowplayer.org)
If you are looking at making something to be used outside of a webpage completely, I think you can do that using the Flash tools from Adobe.
Rachel
FlowPlayer, JWPlayer and all other similar players are fine for managing streaming video (from a hosted page). But that's not we need for one particular project. The videos must have self-contained players and not be streamed. This is where it becomes a long story.
Hence I understand Flash can be used in some way - but haven't yet seen any decent looking output. It might sound weird, but it appears that if the FLV has an embedded player, then the user can have control with the technology behind it having to do any calls externally.
EDIT: the last statement is based on the belief (so someone tells us) that an FLV can remain interactive (i.e. the user uses the player), therefore the required format for publishing must be FLV - although I guess we might get away with SWF too?
Err - you certainly don't need to stream .FLV to use Flowplayer - the site I built for Cardiff University ( http://www.paincommunitycentre.org) doesn't use streaming. (I admit, though, it uses h.264 video rather than flv - the setup is the same though for either)
AH! - do you mean you want to be able to play the video whilst offline??
AH! - do you mean you want to be able to play the video whilst offline??
Yes, indeedy.
The videos must be self contained and not link to any external pages or even any absolute or relative file paths locally (e.g. on the hosted server).
Therefore, the only we see this working is for each video to have its own player - thus turning it into a kind of interactive flash movie. If that can be done, then we might have a solution.
Yes it can - I seem to remember some of the videos on one of our really old websites working that way, years ago. The whole thing was in a SWF file. (FLV can ONLY contain video, audio and subtitle tracks... no interactivity or even a player...)
The video will have to be very short or you might have to wait for the whole thing to download before it will start playing - not exactly user friendly.
The ADOBE FLASH PROFESSIONAL CS5 tools and include a very simple video player component. Just drop that onto a new Flash project, include the video you want to show and package it all up as one file.
Ugly as hell but it will work.
Rachel
Yeh you can import flv's into swf's in flash to create a self contained file with a player if you use the 'embed video in SWF and play in timeline' option in the import video sequence. Big files though.
Like you say Rachel, the default CS5 option needs a fair amount of customising to look good and match branding.
And like and says, sticking into a SWF will give it the interactivity.
Just need to find someone who's either done it or is willing to build a sample to see how it all works out. Cheers
Are you really sure the use-case requires it? It'll be a right pain to maintain...
I'm finding the requirements intriguing and would love to see what on Earth you're trying to do...
We use slideshowpro
for flv videos on our site. Very nifty and loads of customisation
It'll be a right pain to maintain...
Perhaps I'm missing something but why?
I'm finding the requirements intriguing
I said there was a long story behind this - that's probably why, having eliminated pretty much everything else we've tried, this may be the only workable fix.
Handling any streaming video is fine - sorted. Handling it locally - that's the challenge. If you're genuinely interested then PM and we'll have a chat. But I warn you, if it works, we might have 100+ videos (typically 20-60 secs) to convert!
The difficulty to maintain is around the number of videos and the likelihood that the customer wants to change them all the time. If you need to place them inside the FLV, then it's a load of manual work to do that each time there is a change. Imagine if you needed to update the player for some reason? Separating the player and the video means that each is maintained separately, reducing effort (and a need to keep Flash tools at hand)
Can't help myself - gonna have to PM to know more... (but not to sit there and build stuff in Flash - I'm no martyr!! lol)
SlideShowPro looks good (for a lot of stuff), but it appears the SWF version requires HTML editing ... which isn't an option with what we're trying to achieve. Hence why the FLV must have a self-contained player bundled up in the SWF output.
Rachel, there will be no updating necessary. This will be a one-off - at least until 4-5 years have passed. Even then, it's unlikely they'll need changing.
It's literally a case of wrapping them up in SWFs, pushing them into our content, and that's it.