Gyani . info

So far working with various video players, I’ve found VLC to be the best among players which can be embedded on a webpage. Yeah it is way better than WMP, Quicktime,Flash or Real Player.

Why ?

• No format issues, supports all possible formats be it mov, flv, wmv etc..
• Open source, you can dig into code.. fix issues and customize according to your needs.
• Great Video quality, we used it for quite some time and got feedback from users. They loved it. You can see the difference by playing the same HD video in Flash and VLC.

It is so good, so why not popular and why isn’t everyone using it ?

• It needs a seperate plugin to be installed, which is very big. And most people don’t have it already installed. Even people who have VLC player installed don’t have it. By default, mozilla and activeX plugin installation is unchecked. Unless you by urself have clicked on checkbox to install these plugins (in between clicking next next..) you won’t have it.
• And the Issue which I want to discuss in this post. Monetizing videos on this player. I’ve not found a single ad network so far which supports VLC. I tried creating some overlay (html/flash element) to display ads over the player (using z-index etc.. ), but noting helped.

Forum posts which discuss this issue 1, 2 and 3. A way provided in the last one works for standalone player but not for the plugin. The only way which people have suggested is to have videos themselves encoded with ads overlay, or to show pre,mid,post-roll ads. If you have any other ideas do post in comments or let me know.

If you are using dynamic data loading in flash, you might want to get data from remote servers. Flash doesn’t allows to access data from another domain, unless a cross domain policy is present on that server. The filed is names crossdomain.xml and should be present in document root. Here is an example on how a sample crossdomain.xml file looks :

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy
  SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
  <allow-access-from domain="www.yoursite.com" />
  <allow-access-from domain="yoursite.com" />
</cross-domain-policy>

Flash first loads this file before making any request to that server. In case this request fails a Security Sandbox error is thrown and flash dosn’t connects the same server again unless the swf reloads.

If you are trying to load an external swf present in other domain (usually applicable in case of overlay plugins), you must add Security.allowDomain in as3 code, which enables scripting this swf from other domains.

import flash.system.Security;
Security.allowDomain("*");

More detailed info on how to handle security issues in flash here.