Doesn't work with new version of FlowPlayer

Sorry for not posting sooner - things are hectic at work and home, so I'm not getting much "DrupalTime" at the moment.

You're right - the new FlowPlayer doesn't work with the FlowPlayer module - it seems they have reconfigured the way parameters are passed. You used to pass the name of the file via a parameter called videoFile and now it's called clip. But if only it was that simple - the other parameters are now passed as sub-parameters of the clip!

So my first thought of just adapting the existing module is out the window and it's probably going to be better to follow the Wijering system and write a FlowPlayer 3 specific module :-(

In the interim, you can still get FlowPlayer 2 from Tucows (thanks to grayside for posting the link on the documentation page).

So, I will work on this, but with Christmas coming I'm not sure when it will be as most Drupal work is on hold right now.

Note - I have downgraded this request to "normal" and changed it to a feature request as FlowPlayer 3 support represents new functionality that is not currently in SWF Tools.

Stuart, were you able to make any more progress toward support v3 yet?

Have you started on this? If not, I can work on it, since I'd also like to use FlowPlayer 3 :)
How hard can it be anyway?

I'm also interested in this. Anyone take a stab at it yet?

I have started on this, however I got into some weeds :) I'm really trying to understand how SWF Tools admin options are supposed to work in general, and what was the initial plan for it - since I don't want to introduce too much unnecessary custom code, which will not fit into the main module. Looks like Flowplayer 3 has a completely different way of embedding, so I added another embed method.

I did get it to work for a single video only right now, with some color options for the admin screen. But no playlists yet, and the configuration is hardly flexible. They have a ton of new features!

I'll work on it some more, and post it once I feel it's at least somewhat complete.

These past days I've been trying to create one.. For playlists, there's a problem in that Flowplayer 3 doesn't support 'em. Everything is done through JSON.

It seems Swf_tools is pretty hard-wired towards the idea that a playlist is an external file. There ought to be a hook outside of this scope (is there? i can't see it) in order for whacky mods like Flowplayer 3 to grab control.

@fearfox - I don't know if you noticed but HEAD did have some (very early) support for FlowPlayer3 that I started on before I got completely side tracked by my regular job, Christmas and everything else. I'm just starting to think I might have time to get back to my modules, so I'd be interested to see what you've done so far, and see if we can merge the two!

@reubidium - the way that FlowPlayer (2 and 3) handles playlists is very different. The original SWF Tools was designed to work with XML playlists. The flowplayer 2 module worked around this by preparing the array, but then processing it in to a flash vars string using JSON format, and FlowPlayer is ok with that. The same trick works for FlowPlayer 3, but the notation is quite different, so all the code needs rewriting. I was playing around with it a bit before Xmas, and have kind of lost where I got to, but it IS possible. There are some pretty basic notes on the FlowPlayer website.

@people who are waiting on FlowPlayer 3 support - the new FlowPlayer does a LOT, so the trick is going to be getting the basic module working. It is unlikely that all the FlowPlayer features will get support at first, but hopefully something will be along some time shortly...

Dumb of me not to get the HEAD, duh :(

I'm attaching what I have so far (like I mentioned, it's very basic for now, not much functionality implemented; and there's some "leftover" code from FlowPlayer 2). Why don't you take a look and then we can see what else needs to be done and bang it out together. One piece I know I can add next is the visibility settings of the controller pieces.

RE: playlists - the way FlowPlayer 3 handles them is very neat using the JS plugin, we just need to figure out what's the best way to pass playlist data in.

Thanks for the zip. I've not had a chance to take a look as I was playing (or at least trying to remember!) where I was up to with the work I'd done.

I've commented out a lot the HEAD version of the FlowPlayer3 module for now as there's a lot of "legacy" in there from FlowPlayer 2, and instead I've focussed on getting the basic functionality in.

So far so good - it can now play single or multiple sets of mp3 or flvs just using the standard swf filter. I can also see that it's going to be fairly easy to build in support for the new features. However, because the module doesn't use the FlowPlayer javascript it won't have access to the very clever scripting. But for now that doesn't bother me - I'm assuming people just want access to the player and to be able to skin it relatively easily.

At the moment the code for hiding the control bar is hard coded in as I was just testing it will work, all the config pages and accessing settings through the swf filter will come later.

I just committed the work back to HEAD so it's there if you want to take a look.

More work committed to HEAD this evening. Seems to be working ok with audio and video, single files and playlists. Basis of code in to allow customising of the player via the <swf> tag, so it is possible to pass clip properties and control bar properties to the player, and they seem to be working ok. Parameters are as per the FlowPlayer documentation.

No configuration pages are set up yet, and there must be some optimisation possible.

At the moment the features to allow different url's to be set on each clip *within* a playlist aren't available - any clip properties are applied to the whole player. But it does mean the player is available for using as an alternative to 1PixelOut etc.

@fearfox - still not reviewed the zip file - sorry!

Note - I've changed this thread to refer 6.x-1.x-dev - the work underway is against SWF Tools 6, not SWF Tools 5, so if anyone is considering testing the module it is only for D6 sites. Also, I found the player a little tricky to set up. Not too difficult, but you need to remember to download the player AND the audio plug-in.

@BWPanda - it sounds like you are trying to use the latest FlowPlayer (FlowPlayer3) with the FlowPlayer2 module. The format of the players has changed so the two are incompatible.

FlowPlayer 3 support is underway. It isn't ready for release yet but the latest work is available from HEAD for testing.

To use the current module you need to download the older FlowPlayer (there's a link in post #1)

You need to fetch HEAD directly from CVS.

The old 6.x-1.x-dev package from the "all releases" page is an old development release from the 6.1 branch. That hasn't been updated in a long time as I found people were regularly using the dev release which was generally fairly unstable and it was getting too complicated! At the moment if you want to use the "latest" releases you need to use CVS I'm afraid.

Doh! Yes - you're right - it is still generating! But it is generated from the DRUPAL-6--1 branch so it's the bug fix work on the current official release and therefore doesn't include the FlowPlayer3 module.

I keep "new feature" work on HEAD so I can take as long as necessary (which in this case is longer than planned!), while keeping the latest branch healthy for bug fix work.

When FlowPlayer 3 goes "official" it will become 6.x-2.x, and will be branched in to DRUPAL-6--2.

Hope that helps clear things up!!

@Stuart Greenfield,

I'll download and test the HEAD today. When you get a chance to look at the zip file, check out a couple of changes I had to do for the admin screen, since there are different objects passed into the FlowPlayer which can have the same parameters, like "bgcolor". So I used a multidimensional arrays for that.

I just committed another update to HEAD. I took the concept of how you were storing the config settings, but have altered it slightly so it just needs to retrieve the array with no further processing. The code that generates the player uses three arrays at the moment - clip, controls and canvas. The config page only has a few settings in each category to test the method out. There's more work needed to add in the validation options from the other players (e.g. making sure color codes are valid).

I think there's some opportunity in here to have 'blank' defaults, so that nothing gets passed to the player when a blank is present. For the boolean and 'list' type properties there's all the tidying up of properties.

But coming on quite nicely, am able to render a nice flv player with background colors and rounded corners, and can tweak the control bar quite well.

Will try and make more progress over the rest of this week!

@Stuart Greenfield,
Cool, thanks for working on this! Let me know if there are specific items you need help with.

@Stuart Greenfield,
What do you think about creatinga separate FlowPlayer 3 Plugins module, with unlimited number of configurable plugins?

I just made another commit, and things are starting to look quite stable now. The configuration pages aren't completely done yet (I'm getting bored of putting in the config form elements!) but the key ones are up and running. I'm trying a little experiment and have integrated with the Farbtastic color picker so you can choose your player colors using the neat little color wheel (at least I can locally!)

I've tried passing settings as defaults from the config page, and by over-riding from the swf filter, and it all looks good so far. So, the module is probably ready for some testing...

@fearfox - not sure I quite get the "unlimited number of configurable plugins" - the danger is the module becomes huge and too complex. FlowPlayer can do a LOT, and I'm not sure I want to take on writing and trying to support all conceivable plugins at this point. For now I'm tempted to think that if users want to use the content plug-in or the advertising plug-in then they maybe need to write some PHP that calls the swf() function to output the appropriate code. At the moment I just want to get FlowPlayer3 to handler basic mp3/flv playback so it can be a viable alternative to the other player options!

@Stuart Greenfield,
I guess I was being cryptic :) What I'm trying to say is, I would like to write a sub-module like that, which would support advanced features of the FlowPlayer 3. At the same time I want to base it on SWF Tools, as opposed to rolling my own completely (since I like your module a lot). I'm not sure exactly how it works as far as "bundling" it with SWF Tools. Or should it be separate?

If you feel like writing a component to go with SWF Tools then go right ahead! SWF Tools is intended to be something of a "common platform" for Flash content. We're nearly there with the "basic" FlowPlayer3 support, so if you can see a way to extend it then that sounds good, and it would make sense to include the extensions under the SWF Tools project.

If you plan to pursue it can I suggest that you start a new thread for it, and then we can leave this thread for the FP3 work?

If the "extensions" need to hook in to the main FlowPlayer3 module in some way then let me know as it would make sense, where possible, to use code that's already written rather than start entirely from scratch! If that means you need a minor tweak or change in order to access the existing code then I don't mind building it in.

Cool, sounds good!
I've downloaded the HEAD version, and the basic video embedding seems to be working ok for me using the syntax. Haven't come across any issues so far.

I would suggest changing the file location of the flowplayer3 file to

flowplayer3/flowplayer.swf

Which would be consistent with swfobject / swfobject2 and omitting the version number.

Another night, another commit. It's looking pretty good now. Everything is all in, including all configuration settings. The player files now need to go in shared/flowplayer3, but if you change the filename then it seems to break. So the player filename is now a configuration option as this seems to be the only sensible work around.

Note - haven't got the splash images working yet - the player seems to not like the code format for some reason, although I can't see why this is.

Note - if you use flash node with SWF Tools then you need flash node from branch DRUPAL-6--3 as there is a fix in SWF Tools that needs a corresponding change in flash node.

FlowPlayer 3 support is now in the new SWF Tools 6.x-2.0 release.

I can't play mpg (video) or mp3 (audio) with the flowplayer 3 in swftools 6.x

If I configure swftool to play mp3 audio using Flowplayer3 as the mp3 audioplayer I get the flowplayer3 presented op my page. That's OK. But as soon as I click the play button I get a error message from Flowplayer3:

202 The provider specified in this clip in not loaded, Provider audio.clip: [clip] PATH_TO_CLIP.mp3

If I thy to play a mpg video fiel I get a other error:

2000 stream not found NetStream.Play Play.Not.Found

When I switch to defaultplayer of flowplayer(2) than the file play normal.

I'm opening a new thread for this. Please avoid changing the title on existing threads, and also try to avoid post to "fixed" threads unless the specific issue that was fixed isn't - it helps me keep on top of things better! The new thread is #401992: flowplayer 202 The provider specified in this clip is not loaded, Provider audio.clip: [clip].