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Add Flash Player skin to many MP4s
I posted this question in both the Web Design and Web Video Streaming forums but haven’t gotten any responses so thought I’d try here as well.
We encode a lot of video but typically hand it off to agencies or web design companies who embed or link to it on websites. Most build their own player skins.
But for a big project we need to be able to embed hundreds of encoded MP4 files onto web pages using flash. We’re trying to find a way to create the appropriate files and embed code to do it in a batch rather than one at a time.
We’ve found several ways of going about it one video at a time, but none are very intuitive or streamlined. We own Adobe Flash CS3, but nobody on our staff has ever used it…and while I’ve worked thru some tutorials, I’m no where near skilled enough to do this in Flash CS3.
We’ve used the JW Player to add a player skin and that works fine, but it’s kind of a cumbersome process, and the only way we’ve found to do it is also one video at a time.
We’ve also demo’d apps like the Wimpy Wasp publisher and Socusoft FLV publisher, which work well, but again, you have to do each video one at a time. These apps will do big groups of files, but they’ll only create a big playlist rather than create individual, ready to embed files.
Is there any easier way to wrap multiple MP4 files into a common Flash Player without doing them one at a time and hand coding things…and without having to learn a new software program (Adobe Flash) to do it in??
We’re figured out how to do it using JW Player where we only have to change the file reference to the mp4 file in each bit of code, but it’s a pain when you have hundreds of videos to do this with.
I’ve spent hours online looking and have yet to find anything that will do it in a batch. Obviously there’s a need for adding the player skins and creating the HTML and/or embed codes since Wasp, JW Player and others are out there.
Thanks in advance
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
6 Replies
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Use the Adobe Flash Encoder that comes with Flash CS3. Totally simple.
-Tony -
[Chris Blair] “But for a big project we need to be able to embed hundreds of encoded MP4 files onto web pages using flash”
You need a content or media asset management system (CMS or MAM), and as such professional services to advise and script such a tool.
Either that or a developer that’ll script some some automation for you if you think you can do without any management.
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Two years from now, spam will be solved. – Bill Gates, World Economic Forum 2004 -
We’ve tried the Flash Encoder that comes with CS3 and I wasn’t aware you could add a player skin from as part of the encoding setup. We’ll give it another look…but in the times we’ve tried it we weren’t very impressed with it as an encoding app. I don’t recall anyone on these lists that’s using it as their main encoding and compression application.
The other issue we’ve had with it is that it’s incredibly quirky and buggy on WinXP. We have it on an HP xw8200 system and an IBM intellistation and in the limited time we’ve usee it, it locked up or crashed constantly.
We typically use Carbon Coder to encode our files and it’s a total workhorse when encoding in batches. We often have the need to encode to several different target audiences and/or file types and we have presets developed for the majority of this. Many of which took many many hours of testing to get to where clients were happy with the output.
But I’ll give it a look.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We don’t really need asset management, that’s not a problem. We’re just looking for an easier way of doing it. I had figured scripting was likely part of the answer. It just amazes me that somebody hasn’t written an app that can do this.
We’ll probably just do it the way we’re doing it, which involves copying and pasting code, then changing the reference to the mp4 file. It’s not difficult, just time-consuming and cumbersome.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Just opened Flash Encoder CS3. It only encodes to .flv files using either the On2 VP6 or Sorenson Spark codecs. That’s it. Very limited settings compared to more robust encodind apps. And I couldn’t find anything that will publish the files ready for inclusion on a web page.
I did find some tutorials that walk you through some action scripting using Flash CS3, but going back to my original post, we were looking for a way to do this without learning a whole new software application, much less learning the action script part of it.
We’ll probably eventually learn Flash CS3, but for this project, it’s just not an option to struggle through the time it takes to learn a new software app.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I too have been struggling with this for some time. I was using Squeeze for a while to do flash encoding and they offered some pre-set players/skins but they looked awful. I also tried purchasing some pre built players that were supposedly compatible with Squeeze but never got them to work. Would love a solution!
HS
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