..:: ZOMBiE Destinee ::..

Saturday, September 09, 2006
zB Player 2.0 Candy Bar
[ZOMBiE CyGiG] ranted at 7:08 PM --- Post#115780009001348127

Yes lah! Music and Videos and album art all in your blog and Friendster! Introducing the zB Player 2.0 Candy Bar. Written in Flash ActionScript, this player required Flash Player 8 to work properly.

Features
-Controls (play, pause, stop, next track, previous track, mute/unmute, loading indication on the seek slider)
-Plays FLV and mp3
-Able to display picture when playing mp3 in place of video (album art lah)
-Text file playlist (alter a text file to change the playlist including the URL to the media and the album art and the song name to be displayed)
-customisable default screen (the sceen to show at first and when no album art is displayed)
-Stream-on-click (it does not stream the media and play auto until user click play,which i find can be quite annoying and lag the loading of the rest of the page.)
-Selectable playlist (click on the screen to show a scrollable playlist within the video area size)
-media download (can download mp3 and flv ONLY IF they are hosted on the same of lower level domain as the player SWF file due to Flash's security, its might be possible to load other domain with a security XML file, still under testing. Note that media can be streamed and played over any unrestricted domain)

How to use
Simply host this player in a webhost like Awardspace, FreeWebs, or any web hosting on free-webhosts (I do have any affliates with these sites) together with LIST.txt (configuration file). Remeber to host your LIST.txt in the same directory as the the SWF file (ie http://myhost.com/zB Player CB.swf and http://myhost.com/LIST.txt).

After you hosted the two files (the SWF and the TXT file), embed them on your blog or Friendster using the following code:
<embed src="YOUR SWF URL HERE" height="180" width="160" wmode="transparent" />

You can configure your play list through LIST.txt. Instructions are given inside. Any problem just email me or post comments on my blog.

Resizing
The size isnt fixed! zB player CB is designed to be put on sidebars. The minium width of your blog's side bar is 160. If you wish it bigger, simple alter the values of the height and width within the embed tag. Remember to follow propotion (ie 160x180 240x270 320x360). The buttons are drawn in vector so meaning no quality loss when resizing the player. Remeber as you resize the player, the buttons will grow big as well.

You can see it here:
- My friendster: http://www.friendster.com/11239315 (160*180 orginal size)
- My Blog: http://cygig.blogspot.com (240*270 stretched)
- Kiat's blog: http://weikiatblog.blogspot.com/ (160*180 orginal size)
- Mato's friendster: http://www.friendster.com/5044807 (320*360 stretched)

Pricing
zB Player is totally free for personal use! Just download and use it. But i will not be responsible for for anything, any damage or infringement of copyrights. For companies and organisation, im still considering, just email me rubbish52 [at] hotmail [dot com] and ask.

Download
Download the ZIP file (Last Updated 9/9/06)

Contact
rubbish52 [at] hotmail [dot com]

History
You prolly wun wanna read all these. Ok actually im no pro programmer or smthing, i just always wanted to have music on my blog. in year 2005 March, after JC1 1st three months, i started to blog. Recording all my lousy and despressed life story. I started making my own blog skins. Then i wanted to stream music over. I used to wma embed but well...it looks sucky and can have onyl one song a time. Nearing the end of 2005 (cant remb well), i started learning Action Script after my C++ lessons in school. I started creating the very first player, which need to embed the song into another SWF. Later on, i read on tutorials on how to use the Sound object to play music. And i used photoshop to make the skin and simple buttons. Things went quite smoothly. I released the first 0.1 version of zB Player together with my Glass Core metal blog skin. It has a fixed 3 songs. It took me months to develop it as im total noob then.

Then later on, i used array to give it more songs and did random playing of songs and changed from auto play to press-then-play so that users wun be irritated by the music if they dun like it. The 0.5 version of zB Player is much stable with less bugs and was released in about March of 2006 with my new blog skin Glass Core METAL. The player was given a new look on the same glassy theme. Buttons were properly done as well.

Then i was thinking of using XML to dynamically load my playlist but failed. There is a delay before the loading of playlist and the initialising of arrays and playing the 1st song. Thus there was a lot of conflicts and songs never get played. I tried lumping the whole code into a function which will only execute when the playlist is loaded. Cos the player was quite complex by then. Things dint work well, lumping all the codes, events, handlers togeter simply wun do it. Then i gave up on it. Since then and went to work in the BlogLock and zB Clock.

Until September 2, when Kiat told me he wanna re-skin his blog, then i was thinking of re doing zB Player. This time i used the Media Object which supports video as well. Its easier to control also. Suddenly some common sense knocked into my head that only the array need to be their URLs when the playlist load in. Meanwhile while loading the playlist the control buttons are disabled to prevent the user from messing up with the trackers and counters or accessing smthing not defined yet. I used a text file instead of XML from the previous experience with zB Clock.

All these were rushed in a day.The player was still in the long horizontal form then, and i merely put the small video area for testing. And i showed Kiat the player. He requested for a side bar version 160 pixel in width on Sunday (next day). So i ripped off all the codes and plucked them into a new look. And i tot it looks great! So i abandoned the orginal long horizontal player and work on this side bar version. I remb rectangular phones with no sliding or flipping or turning or watever are call Candy Bars, and thus i named it "zB Player 2.0 Candy Bar" I tot its good enough to jump from 0.9 to 2.0 with all the new features. The second nite was spent with skinning it and the rest of the week (its september holidays) was spent debugging and asking ppl to try!

Its call "zB Player" cos "zB" is the initial for my nick, ZOMBiE. As Tomato mentioned, it means "Zhi Bi" 自闭.

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