I’ve had a crush of needs lately to produce video and audio content on web pages. In past years I had a very good media player which I used for mp3 files. This time around I needed to play flash video and mp3, but I knew the player could handle them. I update to the latest version, and initially had some trouble getting it to work. But I set up a test page and all seemed OK. When launch day came I planned a quick 30 minutes to set up my files — when I discovered that IE wasn’t playing the files that 30 minute launch turned into a dismal 4 hours. I couldn’t get the player to play two files on the same page AND it was hitting some problem in the other coding on the page.
So I decided to turn try the Anarchy Media Player, which has a great Wordpress plugin. The web site indicates the player can be used standalone, without WordPress. But after an hour I couldn’t get it to work. And from comment on their forums it looks like others had the same issues I had.
For the purposes of the launch I ended up with some pasted together solution using i-frames to have the player on two different pages but displayed on the same page. Not a great solution, but it worked.
On another project, already feeling burned, I decided to keep in quicktime for my video and use the quicktime embedded player. It works OK, but for remote connections, with slower speeds, the video basically didn’t work. Flash video works very well, has great compression but still keeps reasonable quality. Then I had a thought — Adobe must have a player, right? Well of course they do, and its built right into Dreamweaver. Silly me! I encoded the video using Flash video encoder, set the link on the page in Dreamweaver, loaded it all up to the website, and it all works fine. Ther are some other media players out there with some pretty cool features but for now I’ll take the easy way out.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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