Last month I wrote about streaming video to a media server via flash. I wrote a script that published to a flash media server and another script to play the stream off the server. This solution proved clunky since I was unable to set the quality settings correctly. Late last week I had another meeting [...]
Last Thursday I went up to Rocky Mountain National Park after work. My intention was to shoot some video of the sun setting. I got up there a bit late and didn’t have enough time to scout out a good location. I set up my camcorder, composed the shot and hit the record button. I [...]
Anyone who sends out HTML newsletters knows that it is all too easy for a spam filter to determine that your content is spam. If your domain sends too many emails that are considered “spam” you may become blacklisted, and all of your emails, even individual ones may be blocked entirely. The spam filters are getting smarter and smarter as spammers try different techniques; we will go over a few of these techniques and how to avoid them.
With the launch of the iPad earlier this week a lot of video sites have been frantically reworking their code so it will display correctly. The iPad doesn’t run flash (which is the most popular video distribution platform) but does run videos using HTML5. I don’t believe that HTML5 is a flash killer yet. It [...]
Over the past few years web video has exploded, and the need for accessibility is higher than ever. Unfortunately, there isn’t a standard closed caption format for video. This article will discuss a different captioning solutions for the web.
Recently at the University of Northern Colorado we launched our new brand, “Bringing Education to Life”. As part of the launch the web team was charged with coming up with a landing website for the brand. The site was created in Flash and when you click on different links, it uses the UILoader component in [...]
Last week I wrote about closed captions on video players and the week before that I wrote about live streaming commencement. Well, we (UNC) got the proposal back from a company offering a solution; it was around $32k. As a result of such a high price tag there is a good chance that we will [...]
On Monday we created a closed captioned video player using flash and ActionScript 3.0. For the next part of this tutorial we will take our existing code and change our player into a skin. Right now, the player from Monday can only play our Frontier Airlines commercial. If we want it to play a different [...]
Close captioning your videos makes them accessible to users with hearing and learning disabilities. For government and in my case, higher education it is the law, your content must be accessible. Another great reason to close caption your videos is for search engines. The captions are stored separately in an XML file and can be parsed out into HTML so a search engine can read them; this makes your vides searchable. This tutorial will cover the basics of the FLVPlayback caption controls.
When I was deciding what topics I wanted to write about for my blog I had a hard time determining the difficulty of the tutorials. As a result I thought I would do an intro to ActionScript 3 tutorial before diving into more advanced code.
In this tutorial we will use look at the basic structure of an AS3 document, how it connects to Flash and how it gets compiled. You will need a copy of Flash CS3 or Flash CS4; if you don’t have this you can get a 30 day trial version from Adobe.
