Handy Flash Integration (Controls & Replacement Tag)

[Ibis Fernandez]

The FFM Player is a lightweight flash movie loader that lets the content publisher worry about the creative side of things and not so much on the technical aspects of presenting a flash movie. This is particulary handy for publishers of content that is not created in Macromedia Flash itself, since most third party apps that allow you to publish as swf format, don't actually allow you to peppare that swf file for web friendly delivery.

Files created with tools like Toon Boom Studio for example will just loop over and over, you can't even add a simple play button, let alone a preloader.

So this is where this player thing comes into play. I created it as a simple way to present my camtasia movies without having to actually deal with all those damn external files that Camtasia requires for the presentation of a single movie. But obviously its uses are not just limmited to camtasia movies.

There is two ways to use this player in PHPWCMS.
The first is to modify your cnt9.article.inc.php as described by LEON in a nother post.

The second is to modify the front.func.inc.php file so as to create a replacement tag. You can use either one or both.

NOTE:
Note: Most swf created with 3rd party apps will play just fine since their audio setting are set to "stream". If you create your movies with MM flash however, you may experience a fps differential when the movie is loaded. This is because all movies loaded will take on the fps setting of its parent movie which in this case is the loader file. To avoid this, simply set your audio files to stream or of your movie doesnt use audio, enclose a small silent mp3 file and set it to stream. This will force the flash player to play your movie at the correct fps setting.

A detailed explanation of this loader file and how to integrate it with PHPWCMS is located here:

http://flashfilmmaker.com/index.php?id=87,151,0,0,1,0


Current developement version is 1.7

A DEMO of the results can be seen here:
http://flashfilmmaker.com/index.php?id=102,145,0,0,1,0

The movie loaded in the demo was created in Camtasia with no additional work. It's just uploaded as is. The demo shows the result of the PHPWCMS integration via the Multimedia Content Part. If you slect Show Control it will make use of the loader file which will add the pre-loader and media controls to the file.

[trip]

looks very cool

TriP

[pixi]

Thanks for that info, looks like a really kool Tag to add to the library! - This deals mainly with adding flash swfs into the backend / templates;

What I am really interested in is how to connect dynamic data to these flash files ( images, text, links etc) --eg -- If I have a swf for each page of my site, and the data is populateed from the WCMS page
data associated with it.. Anybody had any experience with this?

[Ibis Fernandez]

Looks like you and I both are on the same boat. I been experimenting with plugging into the the rss feed via the data connection components.

Theoretically the way the PHPWCMS rss feed can be called to display the data for any of the categories etc.. could easily be exploited as the source for a complete flash based front end, BUT, the RSS feed themselves are just too messy. There still needs to be a lot of work done in that area to ensure the data the rss feed is actually serving is the parsed data as opposed to the raw code data which is what it does now.

If there was a way to create an additional feed with cleaned up results then this problem would be solved, but alas PHP eludes the hell out of me.

As far as connecting data to a flash file that's emmbeded on a wcms page you can always do the aproach I did with the player where you feed the data by way of the url field. mymovie?variable=value

You can also gather all the dynamic values into a javascript and plug thos into the flash file by way of javascript, which could also be done in reverse ie sending data values to the javascript from within the flash file.