Solving technology problems, one at a time
The authors of our learning modules often want to embed one one or more videos embedded in a page. A typical request is to be able to “edit” the video using a duration set in the playist, so that the player shows only a few seconds of the video, focusing on only the relevant material for the current page.
Continue readingNote: this tutorial is still very much in draft form. Additional instructions for those not familiar with javascript and more examples will be added soon.
The Jeroen Wijering Media Player is a widely used free, open-source Flash-based media player, available for download from Jeroenwijering.com.
The JW player has an extensive Javascript API which allows it to communicate with events and elements on the page it is embedded in. Using this feature, the player can execute javascript functions on the page whenever the video reaches a specific time point.
Continue readingSetting up Red5 on a box which also contains a web server can be a challenge if you are restricted to using specific ports because of a firewall. Here is how we set up Red5 on a Windows 2003 server which also contains a production IIS server.
Our firewall only allows traffic on ports 80 and 443. This is non-negotiable, so we needed to work around the requirement.
The folks – in particular Walter Tak – on the Red5 mailing list pointed me in the right direction: Make another IP (or two) for Red 5 to run under.
IIS was already using ports 80 and 443, so the system administrator made two additional IPs for Red5 to use, one for rtmp and one for http. He then changed the settings in the Default Website Properties in IIS Manager: In Web Site Identification: IP Address, instead of (All Unassigned), he selected the single IP which we wanted IIS to listen on. We did not want IIS to interfere with port 80 on the IPs used by Red5.
Continue readingFlash video has several advantages over other formats, especially the fact that the Flash plugin comes pre-installed on most browsers. For this reason I’ve been looking at using streaming Flash video in sites which must support a wide variety of browsers and platforms.
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