Powerful Video Display Component of Flex 3.
Flex supports the VideoDisplay control to incorporate streaming media into Flex applications. Flex supports the Flash Video File (FLV) file format with this control.
A much better tool to display video and far better than the previous one. If I take a metadata, property as example , Older FLV files contain only the height, width, and duration values but the new one has 11 properties a much useful properties again it depends on how much it is useful. Another couple of things I observed are the quality and the performance are much better.
Note: The VideoDisplay control does not support scan forward and scan backward functionality. Also, the VideoDisplay control does not support accessibility or styles.
A few powerful events I wish highlight:
• close
Dispatched when the NetConnection object is closed, whether by timing out or by calling the close() method.VideoDisplay
• complete
Dispatched when the playhead reaches the end of the FLV file.VideoDisplay
• cuePoint
Dispatched when the value of a cue point’s time property is equal to the current playhead location.VideoDisplay
• currentStateChange
Dispatched after the view state has changed.
• currentStateChanging
Dispatched after the currentState property changes, but before the view state changes.
• playheadUpdate
Dispatched continuosly while the video is playing.VideoDisplay
• progress
Dispatched continuously until the FLV file has downloaded completely.VideoDisplay
• ready
Dispatched when the FLV file is loaded and ready to play.VideoDisplay
• rewind
Dispatched when the control autorewinds.VideoDisplay
• stateChange
Dispatched when the state of the control changes.
There are more than couple of problems faced by developers while using this component and the below mentioned are couple of them.
• There is no video smoothing option, Very very weird since that was introduced in Flash player version 6.
• You cannot get the netStream.bufferLength property, there is no getter for it. So you cannot display the buffer status.
• If you are encoding flv files which broadcast onLastSecond near the end, it will throw an error.
• Also there was a state problem, the player would go into unresponsive state while seeking or something like that which was completely messing up the video.
I observed each one has solution but each component has some limitation too. One cannot expect one component to do lot many things. I also would like to highlight that each component you use has some best practices to follow and I hope as long as any developer follow any such there will no problem as such.
