Project: SonyBMG Viral Video Player
Has sexy been gone so long, that the idea of JT bringing it back is making you itch to tell everyone? Wait no longer my American Idol inspired friend, because now you can show them. That’s right SHOW is the word, as SonyBMG has opened up their music video library for all to see and share. MusicBox is the name of the game and the site has a plethora of music content with a nice community wrapper over top of it to boot.
For those in the know, MusicBox didn’t just launch yesterday. Instead it has been evolving over this past year. Being the lucky lad that I am, I have been fortunate enough to be involved with it. So why all the fuss over something that has been around for longer than a month? Well we just brought sexy back to the video player.
That’s right as you can see above, SonyBMG has a sexy new viral video player to play that “Sexy Back”, brought to you by yours truly. The distribution code is all over the MusicBox site waiting to be grabbed.
For my fellow nerds who are curious on the tech side of things, the player is a custom interface wrapped over top of the embeddable Brightcove template. If you want to make your own custom BC viral player, the embeddable template is only available for higher end Brightcove accounts. However, if you have access to that template, and you are wanting to get your sexy on as well, below are a few pointers to save some headaches:
- don’t use the APIs to set settings, instead all settings can be set up front when loading the BC module using config values.
- want the pesky menu to disappear? set the useOverlayMenu config value to false
- with a viral player, BC loves Javascript and sites hate it. set the config disableJavascriptAPI to true, call System.security.allowDomain(”*”);, and if you are aiming for MySpace set the config domain to embed.
- using streaming media, call {player_instance_here}.base.mWorkArea.layout.mPlayer_mp.mContentCompleted = false; in your media start events, which will ensure that mediaComplete event gets called.
All of the above are simple actions, but if you don’t know them you’ll be searching the docs and scratching your head wondering why things don’t work. On that note, good luck to the nerds and happy sharing to my pop loving buddies.
July 24th, 2007 at 6:51 am
PESKY menu? I resemble that remark!
July 24th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Travis, I have love for the menu ;), just not when I’m told to remove it. I was actually going to leave the pause and end slate for now and just remove the loading slate, but the API didn’t seem to wana cooperate. It wouldn’t kill just that slate, and it was bugging out the player because the slate triggers a load. Since the trigger is not a button but more of a mouse down gesture I couldn’t disable it and it was firing a simultaneous stream that was invisible and orphaned in the background. Pretty messy, though its unintentional on BC’s part.
August 11th, 2007 at 6:13 am
Kenny, good explanation. I haven’t used the JavaScript API or ActionScript APIs much myself. If you’re having an issue with killing the menu (clearly are) you might want to file an enhancement ticket with Brightcove Customer Support (I hear they’re really nice people
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