At first glance video.Maru looks like the same old platform for creating custom video interfaces that millions have come to know and love.

By day video.Maru has maintained it’s mild mannered public appearance as a simple to use video component. By night it has been secreted away to a remote desert location where scientists have given it a range of features that no other component can boast of.

I can neither confirm nor deny that advanced alien technology was used in the upgrades to video.Maru (a.k.a. Mediatron) but one thing is certain: Mediatron is an even more powerful force fighting to keep designers and developers ahead of the evil and dreaded project deadline.

MP3 Support
The most prominent addition to the already powerful list of Mediatron’s capabilities is the ability to play MP3 files. You can now create an MP3 player with the same speed and ease as you could create a video player. In fact Mediatron is adept at playing both with the same interface.

You can load a list of media from an XML file that contains links to videos and MP3s and watch Mediatron switch gracefully from one to another with silky smooth precision.

Streaming with RTMP
Mediatron now supports streaming via Adobe Media Server using the RTMP protocol.

Load and convert XML to object
The API has also been expanded to include access to it’s core XML loading capabilities. So you can use Mediatron to load and parse any valid XML file and return the the results as a complex object with the same data structure as the XML file. You can read more about the XML support on the PXP2 pages here.

Interface for MovieClipLoader class
Mediatron also has a built in image loader. You no longer need to use the cumbersome MovieClipLoader class which requires creating and deleting listener objects. In one line of code you can tell Mediatron to load an image/swf into the MovieClip of your choice and return that MovieClip to your callback function when loading is completed so that you can modify it as needed.

Additions to the API

• setMP3complete( callback function ) : let video.Maru tell you when an mp3 file has completed playing.
• setMute( boolean ) : programmatically tell video.Maru to mute/unmute the audio.
• loadParseXML( path, callback function ) : provide the path and the callback function to call when the conversion is complete.
• parseXML( object ) : pass XML data directly to the xml2object converter.
• loadImage( path, MovieClip, callback function) : provide the path to the image/swf that you would like to load, the MovieClip that you would like to load the image into, and the callback function to send the MovieClip to when completed.

Source code
Despite the extreme security measures taken during the retrofits to video.Maru agents of the open source rebellion managed to get access to the source code. They have published and protected it under the MIT license and put it up on Google Code for all to see and contribute to. Currently the project is in beta status pending the results of exhaustive testing. By the end of October, 2007, it should be complete and ready for live action.

For a report on the updates without the comedy go here.