This morning’s VideoNuze email brought some good news for Adobe:

Fox Switches from Move to Flash; ABC Plans Transition Too.

Looks like the gamble on adding HTTP Streaming to Flash Player has paid off. The advantages of the Move Networks solution just didn’t add up for the premium price tag. Congrats, Flash Media team!

For those of you seeking (ha!) a solution for progressive video seeking, you’ll definitely want to take a look at the xMoov Server (formerly xMoov-PHP). It’s a free, open-source solution for accessing parts of your video that haven’t yet been downloaded — mimicking the seeking behavior of streaming (alá YouTube). It ships with a prebuilt audio and video players so you can get started right away (but of course

It supports Flash, Quicktime X, and Apple iPhone delivery, and can deliver virtually any type of file, not just video. It is released under a non-commercial license, so if you have ads on your site or want to use this for a client project you’ll need to buy a license. But at $50 for a single server, it’s very reasonable.

http://stream.xmoov.com/

Nicolas Prof has developed an open source, flexible and customizable video player based on the latest sprint (0.8) of the Open Source Media Framework (formerly codenamed Strobe). It supports both progressive and streaming. Because it’s built on the OSMF framework, you can expand the functionality and add plug-ins from the framework into this player.

A quick test of the PROFMediaPlayer

I thought I’d take it for a spin, so I downloaded the source and opened up the project folder. There’s no readme, so, like everything else with OSMF right now, it takes a bit of feeling around to get started.

There is a FLA with customizable assets in the Library. That seemed like a good place to start. (Nicolas has also included a layered Photoshop PSD file that you can use to edit the skin assets which was a nice addition.)

To customize the player size, background color, source video, etc. you can use flashvars or assign the values in the code, in the EmbedPlayer class. (e.g. settings.url=”myVideo.flv”).

I found that the PROFMediaPlayer really gives you a good starting point with OSMF, rather than starting from a blank class file and figuring it all out on your own. You can download the code at the link below; let me know if you think it’s helpful in exploring OSMF:

PROFMediaPlayer | Nicolas Prof blog

Big thanks to Amy Blankenship at InsideRIA for including me on their list. I’m in good company.

http://www.insideria.com/2010/01/the-women-of-ria.html