The XSPF Web Music Player is a Flash widget that lets you stream a single MP3 or a full playlist of songs on a website. There’s a really nice tutorial on Forever Geek that walks you through embedding the player.
The problem is that it doesn’t always work correctly in Internet Explorer. After a few minutes of going crazy and some trial and error, I figured out what you have to do to make the player work in both IE and Firefox. The trick is to make sure the value of your “movie” parameter equals the source of your “embed” tag. Like so:
This use of third-party tools not only saved them money but it also saved us all the time of going through video conversion which I can tell you from experience is a hassle.
We went live with our embedded Flash video yesterday on mudhens.com after some trials and tribulations. It turns out that my recommendation to use FFMPEGX for all your file converting needs wasn’t the best suggestion. We had a ton of framerate issues when trying to convert from MOV to FLV with FFMPEGX so we ended up finding something else.
Our final choice was a program called VisualHub. It chewed right through the MOV file that FFMPEGX couldn’t handle. The trial version of VisualHub will only convert up to two minutes of video but the registered version only runs $23.32 USD so it’s worth the price and then some.
One of my baseball clients is looking to post a lot of videos to their official site this season. In the past, we would periodically post WMV or MOV files to the site for fans to download. The new push for video this season requires us to move towards streaming Flash videos instead.
The video production guys on the team’s staff are a Mac crew so I had to come up with a way for them to convert their regular video files into Flash. Luckily, I stumbled upon the freeware program called FFMPEGX that they can use to convert their movies into FLV files. Once the movies are converted, they simply FTP the FLV file up to the webserver.
Now that the conversion details are out of the way I’m looking for a video player to embed on the site. Right now, I’m leaning toward using the Flash Video Player by Jeroen Wijering but I’m still scoping out other ideas too.
I’m working on a project for a new client with a dropdown menu that sits right above a small Flash slideshow. The slideshow, powered by the excellent SlideShow Pro by the way, causes any elements that try to display on top of it to be overlapped. This is a problem with all Flash objects and the solutions for fixing it are varied and all too complex.
It turns out the easiest and simplest solution is to add this parameter to your object: wmode=”transparent”
Of course, your mileage may vary with this but it’s been working for me so far.
If you’re looking for a simple way to add charts and graphs with PHP you might want to check out PHP/SWF Charts. It’s a stupid-easy to use Flash based system that receives data from PHP includes.
The XSPF Web Music Player is a Flash widget that lets you stream a single MP3 or a full playlist of songs on a website. There’s a really nice tutorial on Forever Geek that walks you through embedding the player.
