Firstly I have had a great time with FlashVideo so far. We are currently using it on our site as a delivery solution for our video work and it's been really convenient so far. However, I am having major issues getting any kind of useful playlist going, which was the other main goal for this module.

Basically I have two content types for this. 'Video' which has it's own group of settings to properly deliver client videos. The second type is 'Video (Reel)' which I am sucesfully generating a playlist out of thru an XSPF View. All of this seems to work great also, as evidenced here: http://www.jamiemoffett.com/reelplaylist.xml

I have a third content type called 'Video Playlist' that has Flashvideo enabled, and I've been attempting to use one of these pages as a place for the player/playlist to live. So far I've had no luck feeding the playlist URL into the player in any way.

I've gone through a lot of failed attempts getting to this point but usually it was just a matter of getting things to work the way I wanted them to. However, at no point along the way of putting this system together have I been able to get the flash player to read a playlist. I've tried tons of ways of passing thru the 'file' flashvar, I've added the XSPF mimetype into the settings, seems like I've tried everything. I'm hoping this functionality is actually working as advertised? Thank you in advance and let me know if there's any more information I can give to shed more light on the problem.

Comments

attheshow’s picture

attheshow commented
Category: task » support
Priority: Critical » Normal
Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

Are you using the JW Flash Player? Also, I'm a little unclear on how you're producing your playlist (sounds like you're doing something other than the built-in playlists that can be generated by FlashVideo). One thing that you might try is just hard-coding an HTML page using whatever player you're using and hard-coding a playlist XML for that player to feed off of. If it works in that scenario, you can try moving more towards using dynamic content created in Drupal. I'm not sure if this helps you much...

amirite’s picture

amirite commented

Thanks for the reply. I'll try to be as thorough as possible in answering. Yes, it's the JW player that I'm using. Right now I'm using the XSPF Playlist module to generate that playlist. It needs to be dynamic, based on a content type, and also include information like Title and Annotation, so I decided to choose this as my playlist solution since the end result is simply an XML document (which should be working with the JW player from what I can tell). To be honest I never quite understood the way that playlists are supposed to be generated in FlashVideo aside from using the 'fids' param.

Anyway. I can try a hardcoded version next for debugging purposes I suppose, although having a dynamically generated list is really what the end product needs to be. Part of what I'm actually unclear on, however, is actually getting FlashVideo to look for this file. How SHOULD I be doing it? Because the error I'm getting is that the player will simply not appear (video not available), not the error within the JW Player that I would expect. This leads me to believe that I'm just not giving it the playlist correctly.

Right now, I have a 'Playlist' content type set up with FlashVideo enabled, and on that page I have a [video] tag. I've tried entering the playlist url into that tag, I've tried replacing the '@video' value in the settings page for that content type. So far I've gotten no change in behavior.

Here's the page I'm trying to do that on:
http://www.jamiemoffett.com/reel2

The top video is in my theme and I currently have the '@video' value set to the playlist url. No dice. The bottom player shows the desired effect, but it's just [video:node=###] right now as an example.

attheshow’s picture

attheshow commented

I think you probably want to set file=http://www.jamiemoffett.com/reelplaylist.xml instead of file=...flv&location=http://www.jamiemoffett.com/reelplaylist.xml. Have you tried that?

amirite’s picture

amirite commented

Yeah, I actually tried this first, using location was kind of a shot in the dark desperate attempt... just changed the setting back and still no dice.

Edit: Okay, I kind of take that back... after changing that param in the content settings, the bottom player (which is using the video tag and node param) actually showed the second thumbnail so it seems to be getting that file param somehow. The param is not being passed on to the first player however, which is the one I have implimented using PHP. Is this functionality intentional?

Anyway if I remove the node param from the video tag then it sops working again. Strange. In it's current state though the bottom player seems to be at least picking the playlist up.

I tried the hardcoded playlist as well, but it's giving me identical results to the generated one.
http://www.jamiemoffett.com/testplaylist.xml

so I guess my two questions now are:

What is wrong with the formatting of this playlist that prevents the player from parsing it correctly?

And does the playlist only pass through to players that are using the [video] tag with the node parameter?

attheshow’s picture

attheshow commented

Dear amirite,

As far as how to format an XML playlist to work with the JW Player, you should probably take a look at their documentation at: http://developer.longtailvideo.com/trac/wiki/FlashFormats

In regards to implementing the FlashVideo playlist via the code API (not having to use the [video] tag), you might take a look at the code snippet I mentioned in comment #6 in the issue: #349754: Setting up node template to automatically display more than one video.

attheshow’s picture

attheshow commented
Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Fixed

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.