Multiple Videos Simultaneously Playing in Flash 1

[tfhwargt3]

I am starting a project and I am wondering if Flash has the potential to do what i want in the end result. The final result will be an application that the user can interact with that will have at least 5 different videos simultaneously playing onscreen at all times. So say the screen is only 800x600, that would mean at the least you would have 5 (80X80) videos playing all at the same time. The application will also need to have other videos that just aren't playing but are sitting still at a frame specified by the use.

For instance, one thing I would like to implement is if the user were to mouse over a video then maybe a menu would come up, or the video might just start playing from the frame it was currently at, and then, when the user leaves that video with the mouse, it would stop playing.

Does this sound like a flash app, or should I look into something that can handle more video style bandwidth. I am mainly worried about memory and if computers, especially mine, can even run a program like this.

 

[digitalpencil]

I have just attempted passive streaming four flvs simultaneously from my server to four different video instances and noted that only the last video played.. I have heard of bugs to do with this before, especially in attaching the same netstream object to multiple video instances.
This is probably more feasible with the use of a flash media server, although i'm not particularly well versed in this tech so you'd have to confirm this someone such as oldnewbie.
In terms of rollover playback, this is possible, although it's recommended that you embed a few frames of each video into the swf as an image sequence and play these back as streaming takes a moment to arrive.
Do you need to playback video simultaneously or is it possible you could achieve your goal with a single instance that you could just switch the stream to?

 

[tfhwargt3]

Thank you digitalpencil.

Are you using flash 8 with actionscript?

My project is like this:

I am going to have a webpage that a moderator updates daily/hourly with new videos that he/she likes. I will be scraping this page every 10 mins to make sure something new hasn't gone up. I scrape the page, get all the videos/tags/etc, and import them into flash in some fashion. The videos will be set up in a grid, probably 20X20 maybe as small as 10X10, but more than likely closer to 20. Then when he mouses over his little flash window with all the videos in it, the video his mouse is directly over will play full speed while others around it will play at say... half speed. Do you think I need to use media server, or can i accomplish my goal by other means?

 

[billwatson]

flash has the ability to do this but as its web based then the users video card and connection (broadband or not) are the controlling factors

director would be a better option but then you hit the problem that few people have the shockwave plug in

digital pencils last couple of paragraphs look like the best way to go

 

[digitalpencil]

Yes, a videogallery sounds the best way to go.. and yes i'm using F8/AS.
The issue you have here is that, by the sounds of things, you're going to have a lot of content updates at regular intervals and therefore the best thing here would be to create a dynamic system in which the FLV urls, titles, thumbnails and descriptions are described in an XML doc.
I have been attempting for some time to create something similar and so far have a system in which a list component is updated from the XML doc with jpg thumbnails and titles and onRelease updates the netstream and a dynamic text box for content descriptions.
The trouble I have run into is in dynamic thumbnail auto-generation. I am still currently researching into a variety of different methods, specifically though using a server-side FFMPEG/Mencoder to extract vframes from the uploaded FLVs and to export these as jpgs whilst updating the XML accordingly.
This is still bewildering the hell out of me though so will update as/if I ever manage to make any progress with this.
In terms of using short preview FLVs, this could not be achieved dynamically without using an FMS, as the nature of progressive download would clog the user's line and slow the movie to a standstill with any videos that are of a reasonable length, especially when using lots of videos as in your case..
I have seen examples where the netstreams have been interrupted causing the FLV to playback a few frames and then cease the download, freeing up the user's bandwidth.. although, in my own experience this has been unpredicatable at best and most of the time, simply crashed my player.

If you're really going to go for this then I would recommend evaluating your needs i.e. how often content updates are going to occur and how much content you wish to store and then consider an FMS service accordingly

 

[tfhwargt3]

I don't mean to put this on the web. It will be a stand alone flash application. How much does that change everything everyone is saying?

 

[digitalpencil]

ermm.. now i'm confused.. if it's not live, then how do you update it daily/hourly? If you are running from disk then all of your original goals should be achievable..
apologies, i'm not too sure what 'scraping' is so I don't understand how this thing will be both live, running from disk and up to date..
I'd recommend looking at this and see if it's the kind of thing you're after:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/video_gallery.html

This should be a good starting point for what you want to do, have a look through the source and tutorial and you should be able to create some form of framework that matches your needs

 

[tfhwargt3]

This is how it would work:

The user would start up his stand alone flash application by double clicking or whatever. Then the program would display a loading screen while it scraped the page that someone else, somewhere else has updated since the last time the prog was run. Then when it is done it feeds the videos into flash and then the program is up and running, then periodically throughout the day, the scraping script is run to ensure the latest videos. This is taken care of by some timer application the cues the python scrip that then cues the flash application to change its videos in a timely manner. Does that make sense?

Thanks

 

[digitalpencil]

Kinda.. so basically, you want a system that checks against an update database of sorts, grabs vid updates online, downloads them, updates its gallery and then runs the vids client-side?
You mention a python script.. what would this be doing? How do you propose that the system would update itself? what would be dynamically powering it? XML?

 

[tfhwargt3]

Basically, I would have a C script running all day that would count what time it is, then on every interval, say once an hour, it would call the python script to scrape the database for videos. Then it would download them and incorporate them into the (quasi-streaming) video feed. So the user would see videos that were an hour old at the most. And they would all be on his on screen app running in flash from his home computer. sort of a stand alone video downloader. Does that make more sense?

Thanks