daleyjem.com

There are a handful of applications out there that allow you to play Flash videos (.flv, .f4v), but I personally have run into different limitations of each. VLC is a cross-platform software that allows Flash video playback, but sometimes you get a weird looking video (when it doesn’t show that way in a native Flash Video object). Along with that, it and many other different software out there don’t allow the playback of RTMP (Flash Media Server streaming) or even HTTP paths.

So I made my own and so far it has served me well. It includes the following features:

1. Runs on the Adobe AIR platform, so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
2. Allows opening of local Flash video files, as well as RTMP/HTTP video paths.
3. Allows progressively downloaded playback of YouTube URL’s.
4. “Always on top” menu option for staying on top of other windows after losing primary focus.
5. “Properties” panel shows video meta info (width, height, bitrate, etc.)

Also, although there’s no GUI for customizing the video component skin, a user can easily overwrite the image files in the “control” directory of the app’s application directory with his/her own. The application will center components accordingly regardless of differing heights from the original skin’s.

Download:
FlashVideoPlayer.air
sample_modified_skin.zip

So a buddy of mine from work needed some way to convert video files to WMV format for clients. Don’t ask why companies seem to love that format. Either way… I was always doing it for him using FFmpeg until he finally installed a Windows 7 virtual on his Mac to do it himself. Frankly, I didn’t like that option still. I wanted to make it even more easy for him.

The main issue I had was that I don’t know of a Mac binary version of FFmpeg, but I did read parts of an article that said you could just extract it from FFmpegX (the Mac wrapper for FFmpeg).

The fun part came in when I discovered that the recently released version of Adobe AIR 2.0 now allows “Native Processes.” I’ve been waiting for. Now all I have to do is package FFmpeg with an AIR app GUI and my friend is in business. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping a video file onto the app shortcut and then picking a few options.

Download:
WMVConverter.air (Still only works on Windows till I can extract the Mac binary)