Benito de Miranda is an experienced programmer from the Netherlands. He contacted me in the Spring of ‘07 with some questions about video.Maru. He was working on his first Flash based project: a website for his girlfriend, Maedy who is a is a multitalented artist.

He wanted to use videos not just as content but as part of the design. However, he needed some functionality from video.Maru that it didn’t have at the time, such as an extensive API where he could control videos without user interaction. We discussed his needs and I rolled them into the current version of video.Maru 2.0.

Now his site is launched and he has really pushed video.Maru to it’s limits.

Below is a short interview with Benito talking about his experience with Flash and video.Maru.

How did you get into Flash?

A couple of years ago I started playing with Flash. Nothing fancy, I only completed some basic Flash tutorials and made some simple Tweens. That’s about it.

How long have you been doing Flash design/development?

Actually, Maedy.com is my first Flash hobby project which I completed in about 4 months. I do have a background in Java programming and when I read what you can do with Actionscript I was hooked on Flash. Although Maedy.com is a hobby project, I still wanted to implement some nifty features for the website….

What made you decide to use video.Maru?

…and this is where video.Maru comes into play. I was Googling for a Flash video player with XML features and that’s how I found the component. I started experimenting with video.Maru to see whether it was suitable for my website. It didn’t take me much time to realize that that video.Maru is more than suitable for my website; it’s packed with easy to use features, it’s a very stable and fast module, the video tutorials are crystal clear and the support is wonderful.

Authors note: and it’s free and soon to be open sourced.

How do you think video.Maru benefited you in your project?
To be honest, video.Maru made the Maedy.com website cooler than I expected. It really complemented the initial design of the website. Additionally, video.Maru saved me a lot of time developing the video features for my website.

polyGeek here: I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Benito for not only using video.Maru but also in his suggestions of features to add. He pushed me to make video.Maru better for the Flash community.