December 2008 Archives

I'm beginning to work on a rather large video project and have evaluated close to a hundred different players including both the commercial and open source varieties. Long story short, I didn't find one that met my needs, entirely. With that, I started creating my own. The result is SpringPlayer v1.0.

SpringPlayer is an Adobe Flash-based video player written in Actionscript 3 that targets Flash Player 9.0.115 and higher. There were three design goals of the player:

• Focus on usability to deliver a player that's functional, elegant and easy to use.
• Create a player that's small and compact and requires minimal time to download.
• Make it free for the world to use.

With this simple criteria, I've created a player with the following features:

• Written in Actionscript 3 targeting Flash Player 9 and higher.
• Compact filesize of only 13Kb.
• Supports HTTP progressive download.
• Fullscreen support with controls.
• Plays back FLV, F4V, MP4 and some MOV's.
• Videos can be resized to fill available screen or can maintain aspect ratio.
• Supports any aspect ratio (4:3, 16:9, 1.85:1, etc).
• Simple and easy to integrate into virtually any website.

As of this entry, SpringPlayer does not yet support RTMP, but will in early 2009. Support for Flash Media Server 2.x/3.x, Red5 and Wowza are in process as well as a lot of code optimizations. The goal is to add some additional functionality while decreasing the filesize of the SWF. Currently it weighs in at 13Kb which is significanly smaller than players written using Adobe's own FLVPlayer component.

Visit the SpringPlayer project page for more details or to watch a demo of the player in action. You can also download the player and use it free of charge on your own personal or commercial site.