If you liked the first video tutorial on XML with video.Maru then you’re gonna love this one.

Note: this takes off where the previous page/tutorial - XML Basics - left off.

If you would like to spruce up your linkIcon with a little icon or thumbnail of the video then you can add a MovieClip to your linkBTN with an instance name of linkIcon. To describe the image/swf to load into that linkIcon go over to your XML and add an attribute to the video node in question like this: iconsrc=”folder/path.png”

That image/swf will then get loaded into the corresponding linkBTN. The size element that gets loaded will default to it’s native size. If you would like to resize it then add the attributes: iconWidth/iconHeight to the node in question.

You’ll notice that the loaded element is always centered inside the linkIcon MovieClip.

Titles and descriptions

video.Maru makes it very easy to display the title of the video and also a description of the currently playing video. Simply create a TextField with an instance name of videoTitle and then add a corresponding attribute to the <video> node in the XML of videoTitle=”someString”.

The description works just the same except the value in the XML for that TextField is the value of the corresponding <video> node. Below is an example of how that works.

Notice that the second node value uses CDATA. That’s a special way of embedding HTML code inside of XML. You can use any of the standard HTML tags that the Flash TextFields support.

This is just an overview of some of the XML support in video.Maru. Check out the complete XML documentation page for all the details.