Customizing the Flash Video Player

Just thought I'd do a quick post to let you know what I'm up to. I've been experimenting with flash video recently and have created a custom flash player. I realised there is a lot to video encoding and formatting I knew relatively little about before embarking on this current project. I have, however, learnt quite a lot of nifty techniques along the way and am over the moon with the outcome. I will be posting the player here to view once the site goes live and will probably do a bit of a tutorial as well.

Useful references:

• 'Customizing the FLVPlayback Component' Adobe


• 'Custom Video Player' Layer Magazine

Nice player examples:


Veoh's player is very Windows Media Player 11 in style and has a nice 'Options' interface.



This Viddler player is of particular interest as it allows the viewer to add tags to specific points on the video timeline.

Design / Development Programs Poll Results

Well, a big thank you to everyone who took part in this poll. I've decided to cap it at 200 441 votes as it just keeps on rising. A big thanks to Cameron Adams who featured a link to this poll on his homepage and to Dan Lindop for your kind comments. Well, onto the results. I discovered quite a few programs in the 'other' section that should probably have been in the initial poll such as Indesign(2), eMacs(1), UltraEdit(2), TextWrangler(1), Lotus Notes(1), VIM(1), VI(1), PaintShop Pro(1), ZEND Studio(1), GoLive(1), Coda(1), XARA(2), TextMate(10), skEdit(1), CSSEdit(1), OmmiGraffle(2), Notepad(2), Smultron (1), Quanta Plus(1), jEdit(2), PHP Designer 2007(1), Homesite(1), Inkscape(2), CrimsonEditor(2), SCITE(1), Textpad(1).

I also discovered after posting the blog that it is difficult to decipher between designers, developers and people who do both so the poll should probably have been split into separate elements really. For example, coming from a very technical company I assumed programs like Edit Plus and Visual Studio would feature higher than Dreamweaver but it was probably Graphic Designers as opposed to Web Developers who checked this box. I have analysed the results and split them into the two separate elements.