Need help 'cuz .flv + .swf = .arrrrgh!

[GayGeek]

Need a bit of technical help here.

I'm putting together a major revision of my site that will display promo videos that webmasters are send to affiliates.

I'm making some headway. I've got .wmv files playing in the three major browsers, and I can get .mp4 working in Chrome and Internet Explorer. (Apparently Firefox doesn't play well with .mp4.)

What's killing me is the .flv files. I spent several hours last night Googling the issue. Most advice agrees that to play .flv files, I also need a .swf file/player/whatever to go along with it. But none of the webmasters are sending it out, and I have no idea how to find such a file to provide.

Can anyone provide a bit of advice on showcasing Flash files?

Thanks!

--Aaron

[nickbaer]

I find that after a few tries with Google, it starts fighting me. I spent 2 days using Google to figure out something not unlike what you are doing, and Google kept going down the same path to nowhere.

Then I used BING and got what I eventually went with, on the first or second try.

The thing I did last week was I changed from digital downloads to html5/CSS streaming. I did make some .flvs a couple of years ago. So in my new html5/CSS player window, the .avis, .movs, .mp*s look great. The .flvs look like a thumbnail, in the upper 20% of the window.

I think that's a clue as to what the past, present and future is with .flvs...



You should release some self work. You were always one of the more handsome of self shooters, and the self pic you shared here a couple of years ago, put a lot of pornstars to shame.

[mhorst]

Have a look at jplayer. I use it on my Joomla site to deliver flash video streaming. It works on other formats as well not just Joomla. It's a javascript plugin that works cross platform on any website. Best of all it's free and open source.

[x0pa]

Have a look at jplayer. I use it on my Joomla site to deliver flash video streaming. It works on other formats as well not just Joomla. It's a javascript plugin that works cross platform on any website. Best of all it's free and open source.

yeah and you only need to use mp4 cause flash plays that format jplayer is great quick and easy why bother with wmv at all?

[GayGeek]

Thanks for the advice. My site is entirely hand crafted, so I'll have to explore the feasibility about using the Jplayer plugin.

I haven't entirely figured out what to do with video. .mp4 doesn't work in Firefox, so I had thought perhaps offering two video formats might be a good idea. Let the users play whichever works for them. Not to mention affiliates don't always release the same formats. So if I restrict myself to .mp4 I might not be able to show promo videos from some companies.

This is still a work in progress, so all is subject to change. I've been working on navigation while I awaited your replies.

As for releasing more of me? Ha! I'm 41 now and the last of my "twinkishness" has faded along with much of my hairline. Not to mention I've got a son now (age 3.5) and am content to live a much more tame life. My travels to film myself fucking around with cute twinks all over the world has given me enough erotic memories to last half a dozen lifetimes. I am content to pass the torch to the next generation. My former archive of work is now gathering virtual dust in an AEBN hard drive somewhere. : )

Thanks for the compliment though! And thanks to everyone for their technical advice.

--Aaron

[GayGeek]

A little follow-up on the above. I installed jPlayer this evening and started tinkering with it. It may be just the thing I need.

One issue though -- it doesn't seem to be able to automatically resize depending on the resolution of the video. Assuming I am correct in that, does anyone know a way to determine video resolution in php?

I just spent 20 minutes on Google and the closest answer I found was a php extension called ffmpeg which hasn't been updated since 2008. Bing was worse -- I kept getting tons of porn related sites in my search because they had "videoresolution.php" in their URL. (Filtering them out didn't much improve the quality of Bing's response.)

I realize this follow-up is getting a bit technical for these forums, but since some of you have worked with jPlayer I thought you might have come up with a solution to this issue.

Free ice cream to anyone who can solve this for me.

[mhorst]

The resolution of my videos is always the same so I don't have that issue sorry.

[GayGeek]

Just a little thank you and epilogue for those that chimed in above.

In the end I went with JW player, which is what Lucas Entertainment uses. I installed J Player at first, but decided I wanted something a bit more polished looking and didn't want to deal with rewriting the CSS rules on my own.

Installation-wise, JW player is easier to add to a website. Like J Player, it isn't able to auto-size to match the size of the video being played. (I'm guessing no embedded players do, but am not sure on that.) But it will resize the video to match the player's dimensions and will add black bars when the proportions don't match.

I'm now winding down coding on the new upgrade for GayGeek, and hope to begin reviewing sites en masse by this weekend for the new version of GayGeek's premier later this month.

--Aaron

PS, Now if I could only find someone who wanted to discuss grammatical parsers for custom search engines. I hand-coded GayGeek's search engine a few years ago and am very proud of it. Every so often I look through the list of recorded searches to see how they are currently parsing. If I find abnormalities I can easily add new grammatical rules to the parser. I'm not sure how many folks hanging around on this forum enjoy this leveling of programming though. In its own way, programming is more fun than porn production.

[mhorst]

Hmmm I think I would take porn production any day over programming!

[nickbaer]

I do both porn production, and programming.

I recently spent a week implementing my new subscription based eBook photo viewers, then my video clip viewers. That was a week of html/CSS/Javascript.

This past week, I have been releasing new versions of 15 popular DVD titles. Toast, Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. This project allowed me to do Final Cut, rather than head-achy Premiere.

I have to sell what I shoot, so that I can shoot more. It is a dance.