Introducing the Dreamsocket Media Player
- Media Framework
- Product release
We decided that sooner than later we would start throwing the UI elements into our Media framework. It seemed logical to give you a "face" of what you can do with our framework in a short amount of time. I also wanted to show that we eat our own dog food since we needed our own player for tutorial videos, video captures of apps, and showing things off in general. So, after a few hours of playing around and porting some existing controls, we created our branded Dreamsocket player. It's got a little Hulu influence, some MTV in there too, and twisted out at the end with some good ole Dreamsocket love. Check the scrubber tooltip fancy, collapsing controls, and more! Simple and fun, best of all you can use it for FREE!
Player Configuration
To get started, download the player here and embed it on your site with any Flash video (flv or mp4 format) using the following flash vars:
- file - the video path
- image - the poster image path (still that represents your video)
- google_analytics_id - a google analytics id if you would like to track your video
When embedding it on a page, be aware that it is written in Actionscript 3 and requires Flash Player 9 or above to work.
A great thing to note is that a lot of plugins and CMS tools already use these flash vars for other players. So if you are already setup and like what we have just drop ours in and you don't have to do anything else :).
Google Analytics
The Google Analytics was a little extra feature we added for our own benefit as well as yours. It enables you to have analytics that define viewership of your video content. Obviously you don't have to use it for the player to work. If you don't pass in google analytics ID as a flash var because you a) don't have an account or b) don't want to, the player just ignores tracking. Since Google Analytics is free and it is fun just seeing that kind of data, we think you should at least try it out ;).
Our player tracks videos currently as page views like:
-
/videos/{EVENT}/{VIDEO_URL} - EVENT can be playStarted, playPaused, playResumed, playCompleted.
This is relatively simple tracking for the time being, but still gives you great data to chomp on.
The Future
This player was thrown together extremely fast. It serves as simple "face" to our framework and we'll be throwing its code into our downloads soon with a "beta" stamp on it. Expect improvements, new "faces", and much more coming. Let us know what you think and grab our framework to start building your own great media applications today!
