That’s incredible. How do you think of these things?

I sort of reverse engineered it. I started with how I would like it to work, in a perfect world, and then figured out a way to make that happen.

It is pretty amazing isn’t it! Regular video in Flash is just a little too troublesome!!

This is awsome, well done.

[...] Polygeek has an amazingly easy way to make a custom flash video player. You MUST check it out http://polygeek.com/videomaru/ [...]

@Tim, thanks for the link back.

woaw….I just got the flashDen newsletter….with the link.
man thats really great….but the best part is that you give it out for free…
that IS amazing.
thank you very much.

@RAN, What? You mean you would have paid for this? FRAK. I should have charged for it. Hold on while I got set up a PayPal account. :-)

Really, thanks. I hope it comes in handy.

Hi, I’m really love the concept behind this movieclip. One question: Is there any way to dynamically add .flvs through actionscript? I tried attaching the videoWindow to the stage and then assigning the flv path, and while the playhead works, the video does not display.

Thanks!

@Dave, I believe there is a solution for you. It’s something that I’ve been meaning to add to the documentation and just forgot about it.

Try this:

1-Download the latest version: 1.4b
2-you have to give the SWC an instance name, like say poly
3-once you have everything set up the way you want you need to run this:

poly.setVideoWindow(vid);

the parameter vid is a reference to the MovieClip that will become the videoWindow. That will set the videoWindow as needed and reinitialize everything.

Let me know how this works.

Thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately, I’m still getting the same results. I downloaded 1.4b, assigned the compiled clip’s instance name to poly, and then have this code:

var vid:MovieClip = attachMovie(“videoWindow”, “flvs/sky.flv”, 1);
poly.setVideoWindow(vid);

Oops. I changed the depth to 3 and it now works. Thanks!

I’m glad that worked for you. In general when you’re attaching or creatingEmptyMovieClips you should set the depth dynamically with getNextHighestDepth().

In your case the code would be:

What’s funny is that I had used getNextHighestDepth originally and that’s what wasn’t displaying the video. It plays, but there isn’t any display.

Ah, well that would have been my fault. Originally this started out as a prototype and – sigh – I used static depths here and there. I never replaced them with getNextHighestDepth. I took care of that yesterday so this shouldn’t happen again.

In your case you used getNextHighestDepth which was probably 0. Then I went and stomped on that with my code in video.Maru.

I have whipped myself 20 times with a lash for such unforgivable coding. :-)

Hello!
I have a problem..
In Flash CS3 you cannot type in a instance name this: xml.flv because “.” is not valid,,
What to do?

@Art, I feel your pain and I’ve updated video.Maru to fix the Flash 9/CS3 changes to the IDE. Here’s a link to the new documentation and download for video.Maru 2.0 alpha.

Hello polyGeek! It works great now :) thank you for the realy fast fix :D

Hi I made a player so people can embed it on there myspace pages but it only works when its on myserver. Is it set up like that or am I missing somthing?

@Taylor, At a glance it sounds like an issue with the path to the video. Are you using something like: http$myDomain.com$videos$myVid.flv

I have done some testing before and never had any sandbox issues with loading a SWF from one domain that loaded an FLV from another. So I’m pretty sure that isn’t the problem.

Hi! Sorry, i was emailing you directly instead of posting here. I read thru your 2.0 documentation and the “dashes” don’t seem to work in an instance name, and you still have “.” in your filename in your examples, “.flv” but you should leave it out completely, in Art’s example “xmlflv” would work. i’m dying to get this to work in CS3!

SBS

You should make a mp3Maru. Flash mp3 players are pretty easy to make, but still, would be awesome.

@Havoc, You’re right. I should. I’ll put it on my 2Do list – currently at item 65. :-(

polyGeek, great “plug-in”. I noticed today that when you grab the playhead and release, it begins playing. But the state of the play button does not go to the “pause” state.

@Marc, good eye. Another user pointed that out to me as well and I’ve fixed it for video.Maru 2.0 which will be available June 20th.

Video Maru is amazing… really nice work. 1 question regarding the new 2.0 release, I thought I saw someone mention full browser capabilities for this new 2.0 version? I didn’t see it in the documentation videos… did i miss it? How would I use this feature if it is available?

@Bryan, at this point I can neither confirm or deny that fullscreen is a feature in video.Maru 2.0. You’ll have to wait until next week to see.

The latest version (v2) seems to be saved in CS3 format. Should it be back to flash 8 format to allow it to work for that too? i have converted it back myself ant it seems to work, partially but the playhead does not move along the timeline correctly.
Is the new version compatible with flash 8 ? (the computer at work only have f8 my laptop has cs3)

i have figured out that it does work in f8, it is just that i was trying to have a play button and a pause button, that are both on screen at once, not a toggle action of play&pause button. This seems to break the player. Before everyone tells me about usability, that is the design i’ve been given! geesh

@Tony, Thanks for pointing out that I saved the FLAs in CS3 format. It’s all fixxy now.

So, the pause_btn and play_btn cannot co-exist. That’s a problem but there is a solution. I updated the API, just now so go get a fresh copy of the SWC.

You’ll have to create your own play and pause buttons. Pop over to the API page for the details.

Hi there. First of all, thank you so much for video.Maru. I’m a big fan :) I also have a question. Is it possible to toggle the sound off & on through the API? Tnx a million.

@Benito, Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll get right on that. Plus I just created a page for suggested updates and bugs.

Is it possible to show the amount of video that has been buffered/downloaded?

http://www.peabee.com

No comparison

@Ben, yes, very easy. Either use a downloadProgress bar MovieClip or the downloadPercent TextField.

@P, no comparison? To what? video.Maru isn’t about ‘a’ video interface. It’s about all video interfaces. It’s about bringing the functionality to a design – whatever that might be.

That being said, “nice video interface” you designed on your site.

polyGeek, just left a post on my blog for you to look at.

Are you running a wordpress copy on a web host?

I noticed the DIV tag on my old site where the content resides id=”main” which resides in a DIV id=”text”

On your site, I see a DIV id=”content”

Must be a different version! :)

polyGeek, Found at least one problem in your HTML:

video.Maru

This line (line 518), is missing the closing tag.

Thanks for the answer. poly. Just to confirm, this is not usable when publishing for FP9/AS3, correct? Need any help porting it?

Weird!

Site looks screwed up in IE, but works fine in Firefox. :P

Hi noob here! how do I install this cant seem to find it anywhere…

@Orville, Thanks a heap for all your help with the HTML. Wordpress has left a bunch of -li- and -ul- tags hanging. I’ll see if there is anything I can do about that.

I hope you find video.Maru useful because I owe you one for your assistance.

@Shawn, The download links are at the top of every page in the video.Maru nav. You can download the tutorial files or just the SWC.

@polyGeek, the page is still coming up with blank content in IE (Sorry).

The problem MAY be a missing TR tag.
If you View Source, select All, Copy, and then
paste into an editor where you can go to a line number, the line is now: 480.

Look at the end of the line.
There is a closing TD tag
There is NO closing TR tag
And then there is the closing TABLE tab.

I tried pasting the HTML for the code in a post before, but wordpress didn’t like it!

@Orville, I’ll bet that’s it. I added the TR tag. Where do I send the check?

AS3?

@Ben, nope. video.Maru is written in good ol’ Actionscript 2. Sorry.

I plan on releasing one more major update to video.Maru in a few months. After that I’m going to release the code to open source. Hopefully someone out there will convert it to AS3.

You interested?

I am a real newbie….how do I get videoMaru_2_SWC.fla into my main.fla.

Dexter, Good question. You don’t need the FLA. You just need the SWC itself. Open the videoMaru_2_SWC.fla file and right click on the videoMaru graphic you see on the stage. Then select “copy”. Now go into your main.fla and paste the SWC. That should do it. From there just watch the videos. They give pretty detailed walkthroughs of just about everything. And feel free to comment here if you have any other questions.

Good luck.

I am building a website along the Flash time-line. When I drop the video.Maru SWC on the stage and click on the button for the frame with the videos I get “256 levels of recursion were exceeded in one action list.
This is probably an infinite loop.
Further execution of actions has been disabled in this movie.” What am I doing wrong…I follow the basic tutorial to the letter.

@Dexter, I would need to see your FLA to be able to tell you what’s going wrong. Can you send it to me and I’ll take a look?

Hey again… I just found a problem and don’t know how to go around it.

I have a content_MC with 2 page labels first one home second video.

I load home first and then click on the video menu button and load the (content.gotoAndStop(“video”);) but then if I want to go back home the blank videoWindow still stays up. Is there a way around this?

I tried

home.onPress yadda yadda yadda
videoWindow._visible = false; but that doesn’t work.

Thanks

Eric

Hey there!

I’m having trouble using direct links i.e. “http://….” the URL just shows up in the output window but no video…

ideas?

SBS

Hi there,

I just finished a website on which I use some features of the video.Maru component. Have a look if you like: http://www.maedy.com

Thanks again for this wonderful component!

Greetz,
Benito

Great work polygeek! :)
I’m sure soon there will be a lot of Flash sites using video.Maru

i use this component on every site i build,

http://www.modern-english.co.uk/sci
http://www.brinkmanband.com
http://www.internationalone.co.uk
http://www.modern-english.co.uk/studio

i use it everywhere, i just want to thank you for releasing this and for making it free!!

Howdy again! Thought I’d drop you a line to point you at http://www.transformersmovie.com/

We just added some of the DVD information for the site. This update included adding the Flash trailer and I immediately thought of using video.Maru. It was a tight turnaround and video.Maru definitely helped speed up my development for the simple video player the client needed.

Thanks again, and I’ll be sure to let you know whenever I find a use for video.Maru in the future. Keep up the awesome work!

Beauty of a component polygeek, I’ve used it on one site already and will be adding it to another one that is upcoming! Just wanted to say thanks, and ask a quick question: Using a thumbnail menu for videos in the player referenced with xml, is it possible to have the thumbnail item play several seconds of the video as a preview on rollover? Thanks !
m

Hi Polygeek,

How would I go about preventing the xml file from being cached? I’ve tried adding a unique identifier to the file name:
xml/video.xml?nocache=” + new Date().getTime().toString());

but then the flvs don’t load.
Is there a workaround?

Thanks in advance.
By the way, here are a couple of sites where I’ve implemented your wonderful component:
http://loupomanti.com/ (“Watch” link)
http://paulreadorchestra.com/

Hello,
Your work is amazing!

I am wondering, is it me or does the Youtube feeds stop working from time to time?

For the last couple of days when I try to show this off, the YouTube vids don’t load. Url’s to .flv files play fine.

Just wondering if I am doing something wrong or if others are experiencing this also.

Thanks

I know, they arent working for me at all today,

please help i really need this component for the work i do, have they changed the http link for cache.googlevideos etc

please help me!

Jay

superstar!

thanks

J

Hi, your work is amazing and I’m using it with big satisfaction.
Since I am using very big files, is there a way to preload the video and stop it till loads, say, 30%?
thanx for what you’re doing

Hi,
I am very new to Flash and was trying to go through the inroductory tutorial on videoMaru. I have downloaded videoMaru_2_SWC.zip. This zip file only contains videoMaru_2_SWC.fla file. If I want to open the fla file on the Flash MX 2004, it says unexpected file format. Is it because of I am using older version of flash mx?

Please advice me how I can run a successful tutorial?

Thanks,
I am going to try soon.

Hi,
i’ve posted a message on the bug/support forum yesterday and in fact i’ve got the same trouble than dexter on the 19th of july.
but there’s no answer on the forum… So i’m still desesperate ! ;-)

Thks for your help

polyGeek

Hi, first of all, excellent work.
Just a question is there a way to cancel the streaming just for saving bandwidth if I’m not using the player.

Hola Dan,
How could I add some vars on the videoMaru .fla document so I can display more images instead of only one icon with myVidXML?

Hi there!!

I’m amazed and amused over this component=)

Is there a way to make the video loop as well??

No worries mate found it=)

This is the far best discovery I’ve done during my 2 1/2 years with flash!! I’m speechless…

How much time did u spend developing this??

[...] could have used video.Maru for their video player but it doesn’t look like they did. Oh well, I can dream. [...]

[...] who has already used Flash to deliver video already knows how easy it is. And if they’ve used video.Maru they know how powerful and simple it [...]

[...] wager that no one can create a custom video interface with it as fast as I can with Flash/video.Maru. (Shameless plug but hey, it’s my fraking [...]

great work. i recently stumbled upon video maru. i have a slight problem, the sound will not play. im using flash mx 2004 and found the link to the mx 2004 maru format. Can you help me out please. Thx in advance.

Joe

that was actually what is wrong with it…. but my other problem is the controls arent working right. the progress bar nor the volume works… thx for the fast reply

quick question… how do i get video maru to forward to another page after the video has finished playing?

Hey and thanks for the great work!

Got one question that I can't seem to figure out/find an answer for…

I have an xml loader setup and an xml file with paths to imgs, vids and sound, all mixed up. When for example the next object is requested my as2 check what type of media it is and then passes the medias path on, in the case of video, to the flvPlayback component. Can I instead somehow pass it to videoMaru to avoid using the flvPlayback component?

Thankful for any help, best!/Dagur