Inserting Multiple Players (Quicktime/Flash/WMP) in the One Player Screen

[RayFrisby]

Hi ! I was wondering if anybody has come across a programme that allows multiple video players (same format) to be viewed in the one screen.

I dont really mind once I can insert multilpe same clips of Flash, Windows Movie or Quicktime would prefer to deliever in Flash or windows as these seems to be the most widely used formats.

I am doing a corporate project for web and email distribution and am looking for a way of inserting multiple clips (compressed) in the one player with a simple photoshop image or animation in the background. I have both sorenson compression suite and mac compressor (latest version). But I have not manages to find a simple programme to do this; any help would be appreciated.



Regards,



Ray Frisby

[PaulClements]

So to clarify you want to be able to pull each type of file such as qt, wmv, mpeg , flash into one player and regardless of what it is play the file?

Do you want to do this on the fly? Can you manually edit each one before submitting it to the website? Or is it for users to upload their video in a youtube manner?

When you say programme do you mean one that you would have on your local machine or do you mean an engine that would be hosted on a server and accessed by users over the web?

Flash is far and away the most versatile format to choose. Most computers have flash player and support it, I'd avoid windows (By which I presume you mean windows media player).

Flash can import external files including other FLV's and I believe AVI's, QT etc.

If you are using a web based/user uploads/others watch kind of website like Youtube then you'll might require bespoke PHP or CGI scripts to make it work how you want with a database for linking the files and corresponding information using something like the Flash Integration Kit. I dare say however there are some opensource projects floating about that will allow you to do something like what you are looking for.

My first port of call whenever I'm looking for something like this is SourceForge. There are tonnes of people out there who want to do the same thing and have begun or completed scripts for it.

Try this link and see if there is anything there that sounds right:

http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=website+flash+player

Wish I could be more help

[RayFrisby]

Thanks Paul ! What would be ideal for me is some way of placing multiple flash players in the one screen. My customers have several products that they wish to advertise and I need some way of putting all these short clips
30sec -1min together and sending them via email to their clients.
I was thinking of some form of single player screen with multiple clips that could be played much like a DVD menue and its subclips.
Thanks for the link to source force will check it out.

[PaulClements]

Are you actually emailing the video's? or emailing a link to them?

Effectively you want a DVD then which has the menu screen etc but is one file yeah? Kind of like if you rip a movie from a dvd to .avi or something, you still have the controls that you can control with your mouse but it doesn't arrive with all the .vob files etc scattered about in audio and video files.

If you have a copy of flash (Soon to be renamed to Adobe AIR) then you can import the videos into it and create a menu screen. From that menu screen you can have buttons to play the embedded files when clicked on and once the video finishes use actionscript to have it return to the menu. You should also be able to call external files which would significantly lower the size of the file sent by email. Best bet is to take the .qt or .wmv or whatever files you are including and convert it to a .flv (Flash video) using flash and upload them to a server. Then call the external files into the flash file you've sent out. That person would receive the shell containing the menu and buttons and when they click on a button to load the video you'll want a preloader to show the progress of loading the file from the server.

Never tried anything like that so it might take a bit of work to get right, not too sure how well .swf files are sent in html emails. Some people won't use html and will only have text based emails so be sure that you include a link in the text based one to an online version.

[RayFrisby]

Thanks Paul ! This client was hoping to email the actual flash file/movie to their customers. I have puchased adobe creative suite 3 which includes flash and macromedia and have a friend who is good with both so I am letting him handle that end of things.
I will ask him about creating a menue screen like you mention, which seems straight forward enough for somebody with experience. I also purchased sorenson power pack wich should allow me to compress these flash files. The files themselves will be only about 30sec to 1 min long and I will have a max of about six. Do you think a file lof this size could be easily compressed and emailed.

[PaulClements]

I'm pretty sure Sorenson is included in Flash now anyway, could be wrong!

How many files are there? Unless the people have asked to have the files emailed to them I wouldn't personally. Even a single 30 second clip is going to tie up their email downloads for a good while. It won't take long before they are sick of it.

Give them the option to have the movies emailed directly to them within the email or have them linked from the email (Smaller email - requires further download). If they chose the second option embed the flash movie in html rather than as an attachment. Then have each movie load in on from external files hosted on a server and as I mentioned before have a link to a web version of the flash movie as a text based email sent simultaneously. The flash movie with menu and buttons etc must be called into the html email from a server otherwise when you call the external files flash might throw up error messages.

[RayFrisby]

Thanks Paul great info ! I'm a newbee to all this but the option of embedding it in the html seems like a good one, in practice what is the max size file that would be good to transmitt this way.
Just to clarify; if I provided a link to the flash file in an email would finding a good server provider to host my file be all I need to do.