Steve Rogers

Well, it looks like the TitansOfTheTrack video and photo archive was more popular that first estimated as the site has started to reach it's preset bandwidth limit.

This is OK for the site as a holding page could be put up, but the video jukebox still played all the videos listed and therefore contributed to the bandwidth usage. Flex to the rescue, I just engineered in another XML file using the HTTPService and set it up to act as source for configuration settings.

This now means that the jump URL on the banner can be changed, the jukebox play functionality can be switched on and off and a site message can be displayed in the player, not bad for 10 minutes work.

This was quite an interesting "home brew" project I put together over the weekend for my brother. He runs a small engineering firm and has a keen interest in both photography and railways. Add this to my curiosity with what can be done simply with Flex and you have the Video Jukebox.

He is currently building up an archive of photos and videos of railway related subjects for people to access on the internet. So I have created am embeddable video player (a widget to use the web 2.0 terminology) that can play the videos that are uploaded to his site. The list of videos is dynamic so as more are added to the site the available list will get longer. Still in the "Beta" stage at the moment (there you go web 2.0 again), you can see the player in the left hand column.

So a little more progress, I now have ShoZu video uploads working to my blog. The first attempt can be seen here. I have used an embedded quicktime wrapper to enable the videos that are uploaded to play and it seems to work OK from my Nokia N73 (using 3gp files). I still need to do some tests using mp4, but need to be careful on the file size as I have set up a small upload limit on my site.