Native video support now available!

We’ve released support for video playback within Sharendipity and we’re eager to see what you can do with it!

Included in this feature are three core integration points for video:

1. Native support of the YouTube video player inside your apps
2. Support for sharing of Flash Video (FLV) files within the community
3. Support for Flash Video (FLV) specified by URL

YouTube support

Google recently announced the addition of native, ActionScript3 support for the YouTube Player API. This enabled Flash developers to add support for embedding the YouTube player inside their Flash applications.

And now we’ve provided an abstracted interface to the YouTube player for you, our Sharendipity creators.  You can now add a YouTube video to any primitive actor in the system by simply providing the URL. There are base actions that let you play, pause and rewind the video within the logic builder.

With these four basic primitives, you can quickly build complete YouTube playback applications with UI controls to pause, play, and surf video content.

Check out these fun little mini TVs for an example of how you can create new ways of surfing YouTube videos.

Sharing FLVs just like images

Just like images, FLV files can be shared and re-used by everyone in the Sharendipity community. The work flow for adding FLV files is identical to the one used for images and sounds except there is now a new category in the asset manager called “Video”. Please read the post on sharing images to learn more.

To reuse the FLVs found in the asset manager, simply drag a thumbnail from the manager and drop it on the desired actor in your application.

Flash video support by URL

If you would prefer to access existing Flash video on the web, you can simply drop the URL into the image property for any primitive actor in your application. We’ve implemented the ActionScript 3 video player and it will play any video simply by pointing to its URL.

If the URL points to a YouTube video, we will automatically insert the YouTube player.