let's say i want to play an mp3 song in the background of the website alog the user's travesal between the different pages...
is is possible?
I would not recommend doing this, it will annoy users and possibly alienate your users without sound. The easiest way is to have another frame play the music. Another way is to have a popup come up and play the music [which stays up between pages].
Within a single frameless page? I can't think of any possible straightforward solution.
Off my head, the altenatives are:
1. frames (parent frame plays the audio, child frame holds the site pages)
2. pop-up window which plays the audio
3. a single page which puts in page content via ajax and loads into the main container while the audio is played outside the container
4. use flash and puts in content via actionscript into the flash display panel
Personally, I would not recommend any of the above :P
Multimedia is the best way to enhance the user interface of any application. In .NET there is many ways to play an Audio using any .NET technology supporting languages. One of the simple way to acheive is Multimedia Control Interface, shirtly we call it as MCI, wrapping high-level system components, such as Windows Media Player to play our audio files.
visit this link.. to get more information.. about it
http://vivekthangaswamy.blogspot.com/2006/11/using-cnet-play-multimedia-files-using.html
Related
I am working in ASP.NET MVC. I want to add videos in my view. I have read article on Working With Videos in ASP.NET
But i want a generic way to play all type of videos in my web page. This article, although good, but confuses me that how to identify file format and then use related type of Web Helper. There are hundreds of video file formats, how to play all of them, by a single strategy. Mentioned article only describes three formats. Please guide me in this regard.
Your issue is less ASP.NET MVC and more general video playback accross multiple devices in different formats.
Your best option would be to use something like FlowPlayer, which allows you to add a player using either Flash or HTML5/JS (depending on the browser's feature set)
I think to say you want to play all types of videos is the wrong way to start. First of all I would think about what video types you want to support. This can be restricted by things such as the encoded videos available, file size, browser support.
Once you have decided on this you can look in to finding the most suitable player for the job.
Is there any way where i can create a thumbnail image from a flash movie file(flv /swf) [NOT FROM A VIDEO File ] in ASP.NET ? Any samples of implementation ?
you can use ffmpeg to create thumbnails of the flash video
For .flv you can use ffmpeg to convert parts of the video (e.g. one frame) into an image (sequence)
I've used it as command-line application by calling Process.Start(), but there is at least one wrapper for .NET (I haven't tested it myself):
http://www.codeplex.com/ffmpegdotnet
For .swf I don't know any way to achieve this without some Adobe tool.
for flv it can be done easily, as others mentioned ...
for swf, it depends HIGHLY on the swf ... if the swfs visual appearence is determined by code, there is no other way than to embed a flash player in you app and either let the flash player make the snapshots, encode them as JPEG/PNG, and send them somewhere using TCP or LocalConnection (a flash<->flash communication connection, which can be used with C# as well) or try to somehow grab its output buffer yourself ... the first possibility should be no more than 10-20 lines of actionscript code ... don't know about the latter ...
other than that, you might use an external command line converter ... there are a few floating around the web ...
greetz
back2dos
Take a look at this article, it should point you in the right direction. It uses SharpFFmpeg to extract thumbnail images from movie clips from a variety of formats.
the only way to get an image, is to use a full flash client that starts playing and allows you to capture the first frame.
I would take a close look at flirt (they actually have an example that renders pngs)
Maybe some of the other flash libraries may be of help ( swfdec gnash swift tools gplflash)
Gnash is probably the best choice since its the most mature project out there, but i do not know how easy it is to integrate into command line tools or into your own projects.
We have been working on this in my company, and we got a proof of concept working pretty fast (but the project we made it for is on hold right now). I am not able to share the code, but I can give you some pointers.
It is not pure ASP.NET, but maybe you can still use it. We made a windows service that can be called from ASP.NET.
Basicly you install the flash plugin on the server, the windows services can then simply open the swf through the swf ActiveX component and then you can grap a picture of the whole thing. It works pretty well, notice that you do not have to actually render the ActiveX component on screen to capture the picture.
Check out this post. It does not tell you everything but I guess it provides the ground work required for it. You probably have to figure out how to get the object tag out of the flash-html you are trying to download from a web page. After that you'd have to figure out when to capture the frames. Its a long ride however. You don't need the asp.net part. Just concentrate on the windows project part. Hope this helps. :)
I'm looking at a project that requires the ability to play one flash video over the top of another... sort of like an animated watermark, where the video on top has transparent regions ans may not be the same width/height as the one underneath.
Using Flash/Flex, can this be done in a web-app at real time? Or would you have to use an offline server app?
EDIT: This is not an HTML question. It's about making a simple video-editing kind of tool solely in Flex. Maybe I want to overlay a video of a galloping horse over a video of passing scenery or something. Ultimately, being able to output a single mixed video is useful, but for video editing that's too slow, real-time playback as the position of the overlay video is changed would be needed.
Hope this clarifies things somewhat?
Put the 2 videos on different layers inside your fla. The video files will have to be .flvs. Make sure the alpha channel is encoded in the video that's meant to go on top... this is done using your encoding program, like Flash Video Encoder. This is probably why it's not working for you right now.
I haven't done much flash work lately, but what I remember of flash (and I assume this is part of flex) you could draw in several files and place them on different levels, like a z-index.
If you need some sort of real-time keying or something of that nature, that is beyond my knowledge of flash.
You may be able to use CSS with z-indexing to do this through basic HTML/CSS means as well. But I would look to having flash do all the heavy lifting of layering, if you can.
I don't think you'll get such features,
Well, I am thinking, why you need to play flash files overlapped on each other .. If you want some water mark (static or Dynamic content), you can have it in a single flash file, you need not overlap the two files for that ..
Even if it was possible to make two flash files overlap on web-page, it is not recommended as good practice, because it needs lot of data to be transfered over to browser(in worst case, 2 files, so double the data), in-turn introducing more delay to load the page.. it is a degradation to your own web-page .. Instead try to merge files (image or flash) to save the amount of memory to be transfered via browser ..
How would you make the contents of Flex RIA applications accessible to Google, so that Google can index the content and shows links to the right items in your Flex RIA. Consider a online shop, created in Flex, where the offered items shall be indexed by Google. Then a link on Google should open the corresponding product in the RIA.
Currently the best technique for making an RIA indexable by search engines is called progressive enhancement (or graceful degradation, depending on which way you see it). Basically you create a simple HTML version of the application using the same data as the application loads. This version should be dynamically generated by some kind of backend server technology. This HTML version can be indexed by Google, but each page also contains a check that determines if the visitor is capable of viewing the rich version, and if so replaces the HTML content with the Flash, Flex or Silverlight application, preferably in such a way that the application starts in a state where it shows the same data as the current page. "Replaces" can mean that it just embeds the application on top of the HTML content, or that it redirects the user to a page that embeds it. The former solution is preferable, because the latter can be considered cloaking.
One way of keeping the HTML and RIA versions of a shop synchronized is to decide on a URL scheme and make sure that RIA uses some kind of deep linking technique. If a visitor arrives to a specific item via a search engine, say /items/345 the corresponding pseudo-URL in the RIA should be the same, so that you can embed the RIA on top of the page and set that URL as a parameter to make the RIA display that same page as soon as it has loaded.
This summer, Google and Yahoo! announced that they would begin using a custom version of Flash Player to index Flash based applications by exploring them "in the same way that a person would". Now, two months later there is still no evidence that this is actually happening. Ryan Stweart had to cancel his Flex SEO competition because it became evident that no one could win. The problem seems to be that event though the technique may very well work (although I'm sceptical), the custom Flash Player needs some kind of network interface to be able to load any referenced resources, like XML data, other SWFs, etc., and this is currently not implemented by Google. This means that for an application that loads all it's data dynamically, like say, all that I can think of, Googlebot will not actually see anything relevant. Yahoo! ignores SWF based content altogether.
Oh, and it just so happens that I talk about Flex and SEO on the latest episode of the Flex show =)
There is a massive thread available here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/58926
But essentially, google already indexes .SWF files (you can test this out yourself by restricting search results to just .SWF files). It can search any text content within the SWF file.
However, if the text information in your site comes from a database / web server. Then it won't be able to access this information easily.
One example of getting this to work is using an XML file as your index page, then using an XSLT transform to render it using Flex. "Ted On Flex" has good information about this.
http://flex.org/consultants
Usually Flash and Flex applications are embedded on in HTML using either a combination of object and embed tags, or more commonly using JavaScript. However, if you link directly to a SWF file it will open in the browser window and without looking in the address bar you can't tell that it wasn't embedded in HTML with the size set to 100% width and height.
Considering the overhead of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript needed to embed a Flash or Flex application filling 100% of the browser window, what are the downsides of linking directly to the SWF file instead? What are the upsides?
I can think of one upside and three downsides: you don't need the 100+ lines of HTML, JavaScript and CSS that are otherwise required, but you have no plugin detection, no version checking and you lose your best SEO option (progressive enhancement).
Update don't get hung up on the 100+ lines, I simply mean that the the amount of code needed to embed a SWF is quite a lot (and I mean including libraries like SWFObject), and it's just for displaying the SWF, which can be done without a single line by linking to it directly.
Upsides for linking directly to SWF file:
Faster access
You know it's a flash movie even before you click on the link
Skipping the html & js files (You won't use CSS to display 100% flash movie anyway)
Downsides:
You have little control on movie defaults.
You can't use custom background colors, transparency etc.
You can't use flashVars to send data to the movie from the HTML
Can't use fscommand from the movie to the page
Movie proportions are never the same as the user's window's aspect ratio
You can't compensate for browser incompetability (The next new browser comes out and you're in trouble)
No SEO
No page title, bad if you want people to bookmark properly.
No plugin information, download links etc.
If your SWF connects to external data sources, you might have cross domain problems.
Renaming the SWF file will also rename the link. Bad for versioning.
In short, for a complicated application - always use the HTML. For a simple animation movie you can go either way.
You also lose external control of the SWF. When it's embedded in HTML you can use javascript to communicate with the SWF. If the SWF is loaded directly that may not be possible.
Your 100+ lines quote seems pretty high to me. The HTML that FlashDevelop generates for embedding a SWF is only around 35 lines, with an include of a single swfobject.js file. You shouldn't need to touch the js file, and at the most would only have to tweak the HTML in very minor ways to get it to do what you want.
In my experience not all browsers handle this properly. I'm not really sure why (or which browsers) but I've mistakenly sent links like this to clients on occasion and they've often come back confused. I suspect their browser prompts them to download the file instead of displaying it properly.
One upside I can think of is being able to specify GET parameters in the direct URL to the SWF, which will then be available in the Flash app (via Application.application.parameters in Flex, not sure how you'd access them in Flash CS3). This can of course be achieved by other means as well if you have an HTML wrapper but this way it's less work.
Why would you need 100+ lines of code? Using something like swfobject reduces this amout quite some (and generally you don't want to do plugin detection, etc. by hand anyway).
More advantages:
Light weight look cuz you can get rid of the header with all the tool bars that seem to accumulate there and even the scroll bar is not needed. This enhances the impact when you are trying to show a lot of action in a short flash.
The biggie: you get it in a window that you can drag larger or smaller and make the movie larger and smaller. The player will resize the movie to fill the window you have. This is great for things like group photos where everyone wants to enlarge to find themselves and their friends. I've done this for a one frame Flash production!
Downsides:
As with popups in general, if you are asking for multiple ones from the same site, and you want different size popups, the browsers tend to simply override the size you ask for in window.open and reuse whatever is up. You need to close any open popup so the window.open will do a fresh create. It gets complicated, and I have not been able to get it to work across pages in a website. Anyone who has done this successfully, pls post how!
Adobe should be ashamed of themselves with the standard embed, which defeats the puprose of convention over configuration. Check ^swfobject (as mentioned above) or swfin