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.

So, a client/manager comes to you and says, “I need a custom video player, with these features:”

• built in Flash
• basic play/pause and stop controls
• a timeline/playhead that can scrub back and forth
• a download progress bar
• mute and volume slider
• plays a list of videos described in an XML file
• must be able to go fullScreen
• display time played and time remaining in the video
• I want the videos to have rounded corners
• It would be nice if the video had a reflection below it
• I want all of the basic controls to fade out when the user stops moving the mouse and fade back in when the mouse moves
• I only want one player but I want to be able to tell it which XML file to load dynamically
• I also want to be able to start playing a video other than the first in the XML list

You’re thinking this is going to be a pretty big project and then they ask for two more things

• Oh, and it must display captions as the video plays
• And it has to be able to stream videos from youTube

After all of this you feel one of two things.

1. You’re thinking you’ll be working some long nights for a while
2. You’re thinking your client/manager thinks this is going to take weeks to implement when you know that it will only take a few hours, at best. So you’ll be able to kick back for a while.

The difference between these two designers: The first one hasn’t used video.Maru.

video.Maru 2.0 is now free to use to build custom video interfaces. Actually, It’s always been free.

• You can use it for free on your own personal projects.
• You can use it for free on your freelance projects.
• You can use it for free if you work at a design agency.
• You can use it for fee to build video skins that you sell to others.

I’m trying to think of a situation where you can’t use it for free . . . I’m drawing a blank here. Wait, I’ve got it: if you are using video.Maru to design a video interface for Microsoft then you have to buy me lunch sometime.

There are a handful of features that I would like to add to video.Maru and then I’m going to publish the code and release it to open source. I have a lot that I’m working on right now but I’m hoping to go to the Adobe MAX07 in Chicago and release the update and open source while I’m there.

Are we clear here? I want you to use video.Maru and I hope you make mounds of money in the process. Either for you or your company.

If you see me at a conference someday you can buy me a glass of wine. How’s that?

Update: video.Maru has been open sourced under the MIT license.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS ORIMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

Much has been made of Silverlight getting into the RIA space mainly so that Microsoft would have some tool to make themselves a player again in web based video space. As Scoble said,

Perhaps the hottest debate in my circle today centers around the technologies we’ll use inside, or outside, the browser to build a new kind of rich Internet application. We’re talking mostly about video, because that’s where the action is, …

What makes news is when a major player - like Major League Baseball or Netflix - picks Silverlight to deliver video. The perception becomes that not only is Silverlight a contender but maybe Flash is in trouble.

But the perception is misleading. Because someone like Netflix might use Silverlight we perceive it as a major victory. But in reality, Netflix is only one source of video content. How much would Adobe had made if Netflix had chosen Flash? A few dozen copies of the Flash authoring tool at best. It’s a drop in the ocean.

The ocean of designers and developers who make video content for the web is huge. Take youTube, all the major news channels, entertainment channels, basically every brand name you can think of with a web video presence. Add them all up and how much of the total volume of developers and designers in the world do you think they represent? I’m sure it’s a fleetingly small percentage whatever it may be.

On the other hand think of all the freelancers, design firms big and small, and IT departments that you’ve never heard of. That group comprises the vast majority of boxes of CS3 sold. That’s where the money is.

I’m not saying that the big companies that we hear about don’t matter. Of course they do. But they don’t have the impact we might think at first glance. By far their biggest impact is the influence they have on others to follow their lead do to a mis perception of their importance.

So how many of those small bands of designers/developers do you think are going to jump on the Silverlight bandwagon and start publishing video to the web?

A few percent? At best.

Anyone who has already used Flash to deliver video already knows how easy it is. And if they’ve used video.Maru they know how powerful and simple it is.

Contrast that with Silverlight and you end up with a lot of questions. Have you deployed a web based video with Silverlight? Do you know anyone who has? What’s the workflow like? How do you do it?

By the time you answer those questions you could already have a functional video interface in Flash ready to deploy.

I’ve been working hard on video.Maru 2.0 for a few weeks now it is finally ready. There are video tutorials covering all of the basics. And while you’re at it you can check out my own amazing video interface using video.Maru. (Remember, I’m a developer. Not so much a designer.)

The primary motivation for this update was to make it compatible with the Flash 9 authoring tool. While I was at it I added a few features that some of the users suggested and then I added a few of my own.

The end result is something I think many of you will be excited about. Forget the fact that video.Maru makes it child’s play to create custom video interfaces. With the new features it will enable you to create some of the most amazing and advanced video interfaces anyone could imagine.

All next week I will be covering the new features in detail with video tutorials. In the meantime here is a brief list of the minor changes:

• Modified to work with the Flash 9/CS3 IDE authoring tool. (No, this does not mean it’s written in AS3.)
• Added a downloadProgress TextField
• Way more powerful XML integration - more to come on that next week.
• Add a state to the volumeSlider and volumeRange to indicate if mute is on or off.
• Video duration TextField

Stay tuned next week for lots more.

I have been putting in lots of work to update video.Maru to version 2.0. The main update - #1 below - is that it didn’t work in the Flash 9 authoring tool because of new limitations on characters that can be used in an instance name. I think the solution that I implemented makes it even easier to create custom video interfaces with video.Maru.

Along the way I’ve added lots of other updates. Most of the work has been to enhance the XML support.

Oh, and there is one HUGE update that I think will be a big hit that I’m leaving for a surprise.

Here is a partial list of the updates :

• Updated to make compatible with Flash 9/CS3 IDE
• Fix for the fact that “/” and “.” characters cannot be used in instance names which makes it impossible to make the videoWindow have the instance name of “vids/myVideo.flv”
• Integrate with FlashVars to play a video
• Integrate with FlashVars and XML to play a specific video from the xml
• Added a downloadProgress TextField
• API to work with dynamically created content
• Add XML attribute to make the video automatically play the next video
• Add XML attribute to loop a video.
• Add XML attribute to describe the video.
• Add XML attribute to display a thumbnail picture.
• Add XML attribute to autoPlay a video, or not
• Add a state to the volumeSlider and volumeRange to indicate if mute is on or off.
• Change the playHead drag so that it works without a progress bar

Known bugs fixes:

• The playhead cannot be dragged past the point that the downloadProgress reached when it is pressed.
• The playhead automatically plays video after dragging is complete but it doesn’t toggle the play button to the paused state if had been paused before dragging the playhead.
• Make link buttons not start video over if it’s the current video
• fix the reflection width (for some reason the width of the reflection has to be greater than the width of the video)

Right now I’m mostly working on video tutorials to cover every feature offered in video.Maru. The videos are all in the 2-5 minute range so that you can watch one on a specific feature that you want to use.

I’m also planning to record some longer videos that show how to create more involved interfaces with video.Maru. Here are some of my ideas.

• How to add graphics on top of the videoWindow.
• How to create animated buttons for: play_btn, stop_btn, playhead, volume, etc.
• How to create a dropDown navigation for videos.

If you have any suggestions for other video tutorials that you would like to see then by all means let me know.

And remember, there is one more added feature that you’re gonna love.

I’m going on vacation until June 19th. I’ll publish everything right after I get back.