Worked my ASS off over the weekend getting the Flash bit of our current project, tehchingHsiehUpdate, working correctly.

And I gotta say, Flash’s video format has got a looong way to go. My problem was that I needed to load a video right after one completed playing. But in my Flash videos (FLV) encoded using Macromedia’s FLV encoder 1.2 the videos would never officially ‘end’ so the media wrapper holding the video would never send the ‘complete’ event. In other words, the FLV encoder is broken and I had to figure out a workaround. I finally settled on using duration (accessed via onMetaData) and comparing it to the time the video has been playing to decide that the video has ended and load a new video.

Then I tackled loading the video playlist via an external XML file. That whole process is well-documented and the XML file is simple so that was pretty easy. Except that if the XML file had any breaks in it Flash would see those as extra nodes. The problem is easily fixed by making the XML one long line of text with no breaks.

Now we have a SWF that loads an external XML file, builds a playlist, and plays all the videos in it one after the other. When it reaches the end of the list, it reloads the XML file. This XML file will be dynamically generated so in the end we’ll have a year-long movie built from about 12 hours of video. permanent link to this post