Author: Jason Cameron

Passionate about design and web

FlowPlayer is a Flash video player in FLV format. Flowplayer is an Open Source (GPL 3) video player for the Web. It is mainly built for site owners, developers, hobbyists, businesses and serious programmers. It uses Flash technology which ensures that 98% of all Internet users can see your videos. It is Highly skin able and extendable. The player can be configured easily and can be embed video streams into your web pages or to your home page, site, or blog. The UI is clean and easy.

FlowPlayer.html is an example of Web page that uses FlowPlayer.swf. The player loads the video file specified in the HTML page in the < object > tag's flash vars attribute.Both In < object > and < embed > tags, This attribute is present so as to maximize the number of supported Web browsers. By default, the player loads the video file from the same spot where it loads FlowPlayer.swf. The name of this variable is 'videoFile' and the value should be the name of the video file with or without an extension. Player will not be initialized if the control bar plugin was disabled and if the play button overlay was disabled with play: null. It works properly without cache busting on IE.

The top 5 features of the flow player for the web that makes it attractive are that it is Highly customIzabel as it Supports almost all the features you will possibly need and these features can be configured as per your desire. Everything can be scripted through JavaScript. It provides an eye candy appeal by its looks. Once used, none will forget the experience of Progressive downloading, solid streaming, long play features, play lists, full screen mode.

Apart from these features, it is free too as it is licensed under the GPL licence. 'baseURL' variable is used to specify the complete URL. When Url is specified in this approach, the video files and FlowPlayer.swf may exist at different locations within the Web server or even in different servers. 'autoPlay' variable is used to specify whether playback should start immediately when the player has been loaded into the Web browser or not. The Legal values for this parameter are 'true' and 'false'. Flowplayer and jQuery work together in a seamless way. API is object-oriented, and it is not just a flat list of functions. It uses advanced event model that allows you to link custom functionality for every player event.

Flow player also allows to use plug ins to put HTML content over the video when the playback ends, or implement custom play lists using only, basic HTML skills. Flow player can succeed You Tube for sure. Though a remarkable percentage of video content is hosted on YouTube, people may easily lost the track from you website and may go on to the YouTube with its highly prominent and visible screen. Moreover, Youtube doesn't do anything other than playing videos. So flow player is a better alternative in every context compared to YouTube.

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