Youtube plugin

[allSaints]

Well, there has been some talk about getting Youtube into your panos, so I checked up a bit on the API.

Of course, there is not so much you can do except load and play the videos, but there are two basic modes:


An embedded player which contains all the neccessary controls for playing/pausing, setting the volume.
A "chromeless" player, which is only the video screen without any controls. Everything has to be controlled by software commands.


In this test I have used the embedded player. It has a "mode" parameter which controls if you want the video to start immediately or to be cued, waiting for the viewer to start it. I can also choose the size of the player.

The test page is here (http://wirestam.com/panos/Flash/youtube/youtest1.html).
I welcome your views and suggestions.

Tommy

[sachagriffin]

The embedded version works in a regular <spot .
Could you be more specific on how your plugin enhances functionality?
Is there any solution after your research for being able to distort it? Perhaps you are more clever than everyone else that's tried and failed at this. Which is the requirement for youtubes crossdomain.xml containing the referencing domain.

[allSaints]

Sacha,

with the plugin using the embedded player, it does not add very much to an ordinary hotspot as it is now - except the possibility to choose between cue/play mode. You could add support for controlling the video from external controls or events or display video clip information in other ways.

Using the player in a <box> is not possible - I think - without making changes to hotspots.swf. But that would only be of interest when using the "chromeless" player, as hotspot.swf converts it to a bitmap. And then I guess the controls of the embedded player could not be used anyway.

The sandbox security and the crossdomain.xml is a real jungle which is changing for every new version of the Player. It's not very easy to find information of what to do in a certain situation to solve your issues. And the debug log is flooded with warnings as soon as you mouse-over the player.

Tommy

[makiedog]

Hi Tommy,
Your research is very timely! As you recalled, when I did the embed method, I could not unload the sound when I hide the video using url=null method. Is this a new plugin?
It'll be way cooler if you can also display a youtube play list:)

Pat L

[kbellis]

I assume that you've seen this?
http://flashpanoramas.com/blog/2006/12/27/hotspot-example-review/

[allSaints]

Hi Pat,

well, it's only a test where I use a plugin to control the YouTube player. And as you can see there doesn't seem to be any problem killing the video when changing pano, for example.

I'm not trying to get the YouTube site into your pano - I just want to show some of their videos. So, on the contrary, I try to show as little as possible of the stuff "around" the video, such as menus, playlists aso...

Tommy

PS. And having two players in the same pano is also no problem.