SWF Tools is incredible.
I can't believe how much easier it makes the embedding process.
The question I have isn't exactly an SWF Tools question but a general SWF embedding question.

SWF Tools + Views make it very easy to create a gallery of videos in a views grid.
I'm creating SWF files from 1 hour lectures.
By setting the height and width to 320x240 I can put a dozen lecture videos on a page at a time.
The question I have is -- "Is this a smart thing to do?"
Do I end up incurring the bandwidth of fully downloading all 12 videos every time a user pulls up this view?
Is there a way to prevent this?

Thanks

Comments

Stuart Greenfield’s picture

Stuart Greenfield CreditAttribution: Stuart Greenfield commented

Glad you like SWF Tools!

The answer is, it depends!

For example, FlowPlayer gives you the option of autobuffering enabled or disabled. If enabled then the player will start buffering content as soon as it loads. If you had multiple players on a page then they will all start buffering at the same time. If autobuffering is disabled then the player will only start loading content once the user hits play.

I think (but haven't checked) that JW Player does something similar.

You can find these options on the player configuration pages.

In general when the whole file has been buffered there'll be a locally cached version that the user will see in future.

The other option, if you can enable it, is to use streamed content. The content is then delivered on demand, but with the advantage that the user can skip through the file without waiting for it to download. To do that you need a streaming server, like Adobe FMS, Red5 or Wowza.

jwaxman’s picture

jwaxman CreditAttribution: jwaxman commented

Thanks for the incredibly quick reply.
So I want to use Flowplayer with autobuffering = off to reduce waste of bandwidth.

I'm still a little confused though.

I thought I read in one of the other issues that Flowplayer is not yet configured to play single SWF files.
Is this still true?

A streaming server is, alas, not yet an option.

Stuart Greenfield’s picture

Stuart Greenfield CreditAttribution: Stuart Greenfield commented

FlowPlayer with autobuffer off would be a good choice. FlowPlayer also "looks" nice and the SWF Tools module has good support for applying simple colour schemes to customise it.

You're right, FlowPlayer in SWF Tools isn't designed to play single swf files, but it will happily play single flv or mp3 files. An swf is an actual animation, and these are nearly always self contained - they play simply by putting them on the page, which SWF Tools will do.

In practice, FlowPlayer is an swf which acts as a container to playback other types of media.

So, if you want a video gallery in which the videos are flv files then that's fine - use SWF Tools with one of the media players. If your movies are already parcelled up in to swf files that's also fine. The only difference would be that in the latter case you'd just need to put the swf on the page. That might cause you a bandwidth issue unless the individual swf's are written to prevent everything downloading in one go.

Hope that makes sense!

jwaxman’s picture

jwaxman CreditAttribution: jwaxman commented

Perfectly clear now although not the answer I wanted.
The SWF comes from a program that turns Powerpoint files into navigable searchable SWFs.
It looks like I'll need to use actual thumbnails for the gallery view.

Thanks for the advice and once again for great module.