emma welles

i have successfully created a hideous player that uses custom buttons and an embedded player to play, pause, and stop.

this was more difficult than it should have been, i think. here are the steps i had to take to get to this, and what went wrong along the way:

1. follow these instructions to embed a basic player
   1. make sure you change BOTH allowScriptAccess settings to say “always” i changed one and missed the other one, this doesn’t work.
   2. export in flash 7 if you want to watch it locally and not keep having to upload to your site. flash 8 does not allow the local swf to access the internet.
   3. make sure you tell the video to play on load through the console settings AND in the embed code:

      config["autoStart"] = true;

2. get brightcove support to give you the “embedded player” and “unbranded catalog” in your account. (for creating completely awesome custom players, you wont get very far without these two options.)
3. once you have the controls-free embedded player in your account, create a couple buttons (i just made squares). use the following code to make it play and stop:

   playBtn.onPress = function() {
   	bcPlayer.startVideo();
   }
   
   stopBtn.onPress = function() {
   	bcPlayer.stopVideo();
   }

4. For a better experience, change the play button to

   	bcPlayer.pauseVideo();

   this pauses and plays the video where the scrubber is, instead of startVideo() which starts the video over every time.

i downloaded the example API players provided on the brightcove developers group on yahoo today. they dont work. i dont know why.

i also installed the SDK, which provides helpful code hints when you type bcPlayer (the name of the player object) into the flash actions pane. this may be the most useful to me.  I’m surprised they don’t call this out more on their help site.

unfortunately, the documentation for the APIs to use the brightcove service is not only outdated but horribly ineffective.  my new mission is to learn how to use these to create the awesomest players ever, while documenting my findings in an effort to eventually create a tutorial or help someone else create a tutorial.