Streaming Flash Video with FlowPlayer
Embedded Flash videos have become extremely popular in the past few years as web developers find that more and more web visitors have the Flash plugin installed in their browser. Streaming Flash videos allows you to play short video clips in your site without relying on the visitor to download and install a media playing application such as Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, or Quicktime. Jumpline.com's VDS Web Hosting service is compatable with many popular Flash video streaming applications, including FlowPlayer, which is a lightweight and free Flash-based video player supporting the FLV (Flash Video) format. To use FlowPlayer, you must download the FlowPlayer package to your computer; the latest version is available at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=133868 -- simply click the green "Download" button, then select the flowplayer-x.xx.x.zip file (not the source file, labeled flowplayer-x.xx.x-src.zip), where x.xx.x is the latest release of FlowPlayer. You may be prompted to select a download mirror -- just click on the location nearest you and wait for the download to begin. Once you have downloaded the FlowPlayer install package, extract the ZIP file to your computer by double-clicking on it. The ZIP file contains numerous skinned versions of the FlowPlayer application as well as examples and documentation that you may want to review. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will use the default skin and simple settings. To begin, just upload the FlowPlayer.swf file to your VDS Hosting Account inside of the /var/www/html/ directory using your favorite FTP client application. Now that you have uploaded the FlowPlayer.swf file, you will need to upload FLV videos to play. You can convert existing video files from a variety of formats to the FLV format for use with FlowPlayer; on Windows, we recommend Riva FLV Encoder, available at http://www.rivavx.com/index.php?encoder&L=3 and on Macintosh we recommend VisualHub, available at http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/. These applications allow you to import existing video files that you have created and export Flash-encoded FLV files. Be sure to select the "Raw .FLV" option in your conversion software, not the option to save to a .SWF file. Once you have created or converted FLV files, upload them to your VDS Web Hosting account into the /var/www/html/ directory using FTP. After uploading FlowPlayer.swf and a .flv file to your website, you can embed the player into your page. Use the following HTML code on your page to embed the player; be sure to replace the example.flv filename with the name of your FLV encoded file that you uploaded: <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="FlowPlayer.swf" width="320" height="262" id="FlowPlayer"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /> <param name="movie" value="FlowPlayer.swf" /> <param name="quality" value="high" /> <param name="scale" value="noScale" /> <param name="wmode" value="transparent" /> <param name="flashvars" value="config={videoFile: 'example.flv'}" /> </object> You can modify this code to your liking to change the settings available in FlowPlayer; a detailed list of settings can be found at http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net/howto.html under the "Configuration Variables" heading. Additionally, uploading an alternative FlowPlayer.swf file, such as FlowPlayerThermo.swf, and changing the HTML code used to embed the video accordingly will update the style or "theme" that is used for the player itself. If you have any questions about using FlowPlayer, you can visit the FlowPlayer Help Forum at http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=453550 for assitance from other users. |
