collective.flowplayer (3.0)

Introduction

collective.flowplayer integrates the GPL version of Flowplayer (http://www.flowplayer.org) with Plone 3.x. It can play .flv Flash Video files or links as well as .mp3 files or links.

Usage

collective.flowplayer offers several different usage modes:

Standalone player

To get a standalone video or audio player, simply add a standard Plone File anywhere in your site and upload a .flv or .mp3 file. You can also add a Plone Link whose URL points to an .flv or .mp3 URL. The 'flowplayer' view will automatically be selected in the 'display' menu, which will show a video/audio player.

You can also do this manually, of course.

Playlist

Create a Folder with several .mp3 or .flv files or links, or create a Collection that lists such files or links. Then 'flowplayer' from the 'display' drop-down at the Folder/Collection level.

This will show a video/audio player that will loop through the media in the Folder/Collection (unknown file formats will be ignored) in order. The video player will be sized to fit the largest video in the playlist.

Portlet

To place a video or audio player in a portlet, use the Video Player portlet that is installed with this product. You can choose a Folder, Collection or File to display. When displaying a Folder or Collection, you will get a playlist much like the one described above.

Note that the player in the portlet has got a fixed size, set with CSS.

Inline

In each of the cases above, the video player is actually created with JavaScript as the page is loaded. This allows some degree of graceful degradation for browsers without Flash or JavaScript, but, more importantly, makes it easy to insert a video player anywhere, including in your content pages.