Thanks very much for such an excellent article. It has helped me to a great extent.

However, will you please help me out with the following problem:

My video player will be playing two videos sequentially. When the first video plays, the second video will preload in the background. How to implement the background preloading with the existing code?

Thanks in advance!!

I was wondering if there is a way to add fade in and out transition between movies and loop?

Thanks in advance for all your help.

I’m sure it can be done better but it works for me.

I find that to be true of most of my work! Sometimes it depends on deadlines, budget, a combination of those, or something else altogether.

You might want to consider a tweak to this portion of your code:

if (_vidURL.indexOf(
    "rtmp://" || "RTMP://" || "RTMPE://" ||
    "RTMPS://" || "rtmpe://" || "rtmps://"
  ) > -1) {

… only because, if you really want to play it safe, you may want to account for variants besides all-lowercase or all-uppercase. One trick I’ve seen pretty often is to use String.toLowerCase() in the comparison expression to evaluate the target string in all lowercase …

if (_vidURL.toLowerCase().indexOf(
    "rtmp://" || "rtmpe://" || "rtmps://"
  ) > -1) {

That’ll even cover bizarre variants such as “RtMP” and the like (not that that’s especially likely). And then, since the “rtmpe” and “rtmps” versions contain the pivotal string “rtmp,” it might be enough just to search for “rtmp” … but like you said, this is already working for you, and I often find the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” a good one.

————————-

function loadURL():void {
//trace(”vidURL1: ” + _vidURL);

_appURL = _vidURL.substr(0 , (_vidURL.lastIndexOf(”/”) + 1));
//trace(”_appURL1: ” + _appURL);

_lastSlash = _vidURL.lastIndexOf(”/”);
//trace(”_lastSlash1: ” + _lastSlash);

_lastDot = _vidURL.lastIndexOf(”.”);
//trace(”_lastDot1: ” + _lastDot);

_vidEXT = _vidURL.substr(_lastDot + 1);
//trace(”_vidEXT1: ” + _vidEXT);

_vidFile = _vidURL.substr(_lastSlash + 1);
//trace(”_vidFile1: ” + _vidFile);

if (_vidURL.indexOf(”rtmp://” || “RTMP://” || “RTMPE://” || “RTMPS://” || “rtmpe://” || “rtmps://”) > -1) {

trace(”_appURL1a: ” + _appURL);
//_debugField.appendText(”RTMP URL Found ” + ” \n “);

conn.connect(_appURL);

}

else {

conn.connect(null);
//_debugField.appendText(”HTTP URL Found ” + ” \n “);
}

}

function onBWDone():void{
//trace(”onBWDone: “);
//_debugField.appendText(”onBWDone” + ” \n “);
}

function streamRTMP():void {
//trace(”StreamRTMP: ” + _vidFile);
//_debugField.appendText(”StreamRTMP function: ” + ” \n “);
stream = new NetStream(conn);
stream.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, netStatusHandler);
stream.addEventListener(AsyncErrorEvent.ASYNC_ERROR, asyncErrorHandler);
stream.addEventListener(SecurityErrorEvent.SECURITY_ERROR, securityErrorHandler);
stream.play(_vidFile);
player();
}

function streamHTTP():void {
//_debugField.appendText(”streamHTTP function: ” + ” \n “);
//trace(”StreamHTTP: ” + _vidURL);
stream = new NetStream(conn);
stream.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, netStatusHandler);
stream.addEventListener(AsyncErrorEvent.ASYNC_ERROR, asyncErrorHandler);
stream.addEventListener(SecurityErrorEvent.SECURITY_ERROR, securityErrorHandler);
stream.play(_vidURL);
player();
}

————————–

Rock on, guys! Glad you’re rolling now.

Sure thing. Unfortunately, AS2 doesn’t support regex directly, but Pavils Jurjans’ Flash 5/MX-era custom RegExp class is terrific. You’ll find an AS2 port by Joey Lott on the same link:

http://www.jurjans.lv/flash/RegExp.html

Fortunately, AS3 supports regex directly. And fortunately again, you just don’t need it here.

To rip the rest of the string, use the String.substr() method. It accepts two parameters, begin and end, and the second one is optional. Since "rtmp://" contains seven characters, you’ll pass in 7 as the only parameter, which basically means “Start at character 7 and continue till you hit the end of the string.”

e.g.

var str:String = "rtmp://rtmp.myserver.com/path/folder";

if (str.indexOf("rtmp://") > -1) {
	trace(str.substr(7));
}

The if statement checks if "rtmp://" is present at all (the return value would be 0, because "rtmp://" is at the first character in the string, and 0 is bigger than -1) … and if so, the substr() method kicks out the remainder of that string.

I’m going to work on this tonight. I’ll post back anything I find.
-Matt

To Michael J …

I have occasionally encountered the audio-only issue you mentioned, but sadly, nothing comes to mind as an immediate “Ah, it’s probably this” solution. If I remember right, I might have had to re-encode the FLV(s) in question, but I suspect that doesn’t help you … especially after such a long delay on my part. Sorry!

As a matter of habit, when I run into seemingly inexplicable issues like this myself, I try to break it down into smaller, simpler parts. For example, can you load a single FLV — no arrays, no looping — with the basic video-loading ActionScript?

var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
nc.connect(null);
var ns:NetStream = new NetStream(nc);
videoPlayer.attachVideo(ns);
ns.play("nameOfFile.flv");

If so, then add an Array instance with only a single entry, and use that in place of the file’s literal name:

var videos:Array = new Array("nameOfFile.flv");
// . . .
ns.play(videos[0]);

Then keep trying to re-build the rest of the code in steps.

To Tiemen …

Thanks for the note, buddy! That may well be a reason to use the if (evt.code == “NetStream.Play.Stop”) { ... } approach.

To Ruth …

I’ve responded to you via email to see if I can help you with that.

To Angie …

That’s a really neat idea! If I were going to encode a list like that, I would probably format it as XML. That way, you could create as many categories as you please — just create a <category> tag, for example, and nest <video> tags inside them. Illustrating something like that would take some thought … I’m not sure how familiar or comfortable you are with XML, but does that at least give you a place to start?

To Peter …

To loop your videos indefinitely, you could use an if statement to reset the currentVideo variable back to 0 when it gets to the end. In fact, you could use the if statement already in place in the onStatus handler. Note the difference here:

ns.onStatus = function(evt:Object):Void {
  if (ready && this.time > 0 && this.time >= (duration - 0.5)) {
    ready = false;
    currentVideo++;
    if (currentVideo >= videos.length) {
      currentVideo = 0;
    }
    ns.play(videos[currentVideo]);
  }
}

To Matt …

I don’t know RTMP as well as I’d like to (and probably not as well as I should), but for example … assuming the RTMP feed always begins with the rtmp:// protocol, you could use, say, String.indexOf() to check of the string “rtmp://” is present in the path. If it is, it’s a stream; if not, it’s a progressive download.

Does that help?