Joseph Balderson at CommunityMX.com has written a nice tutorial on video.Maru. Here’s a bit that I particularly like:

In all my years developing with Flash, I have yet to encounter a component which makes it simpler and easier to create a custom FLV video player. We’ll show that it’s so easy to create a custom player with video.Maru, you’ll be looking for the guide wires!

Joseph, thanks for spreading the good word.

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.

Matt Ronchetti from SISUmedia.com posted a comment on my blog that I’m particularly happy about.

Howdy again! Thought I’d drop you a line to point you at http://www.transformersmovie.com/

We just added some of the DVD information for the site. This update included adding the Flash trailer and I immediately thought of using video.Maru. It was a tight turnaround and video.Maru definitely helped speed up my development for the simple video player the client needed.

Thanks again, and I’ll be sure to let you know whenever I find a use for video.Maru in the future. Keep up the awesome work!

I’ve always thought it would be great to work on a Science Fiction movie website. This is as close as I’ve gotten, so far.

Another video.Maru user contacted me this week with some questions. He is new to Flash and doesn’t know much Actionscript - which is who video.Maru was primarily intended for. However, the manner in which he needed to use video.Maru went a little beyond the norm. He wanted one video player with lots and lots of buttons that would play different buttons.

We emailed back and forth a few times and I helped him with a solution that met his needs with a minimal amount of effort by using the video.Maru API.

Here’s the letter he sent when he got everything working:

Dan………………..you are THE MAN!!

It’s working 100%. Absolute lifesaver…! I had a couple of problems getting it to work with the original file but it was because the videoMaru movie holder needs to be in the first frame of the movie it is contained in. Which I hadn’t been doing. This then caused a few problems as it meant that when videoMaru was in the first frame of its container you could see the control buttons at all times over the rest of my site. It took a while to get round that but I just got it. I put the control buttons off the stage in the first keyframe of the videoMaru holder and then in the second keyframe I put them in position. Then put a bit of script to go to the second frame
when I want to see the player.

Hopefully you get what I mean there, but the main thing that is important here is that it now WORKS!!!!! I’m so so thankful to you for helping me out Dan. It’s an amazing application and I know that little line of code is going to feature again and again on many buttons in many future projects. A million thank you’s especially for taking the time to get hands on with the fla and especially on a Saturday!!

You really are the man!

God bless you sir,

John.

It’s very satisfying to be able to help another member of the Flash community succeed in their work. That’s the only payment I get for video.Maru and it’s all worth it.

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.