Whilst there is much fuss made about multimedia content on the web these days, for many home office users, most of the tools available are complex, expensive and difficult and time-consuming to learn.
CoffeeCup Web Video Player is one of a range of applications from the company that offers simple tools to manipulate Flash-based multimedia content. The product is available as a free trial with a $39 license fee beyond the trial period. Whilst this may appear to be a single function product, in reality it combines video conversion from a variety of formats to the Flash video format (.flv), basic web page development and
FTP facilities to upload the files to your server.
The starting point is to set the video options that you require:
Select Skin - This option will allow you to select from the 12 skins available to customize the look of your Video Player.
Player Size – You can select the size of your player by selecting Small or Large. This allows you to fit the player into your design.
Auto Play Videos – This setting will automatically play your video when it loads. By default this option is selected you can turn it off by un-checking the box.
Loop Videos – You can have your videos play over and over again with this option.
Show Play list on Startup – If you have several videos in your list you can choose this setting to load the play list when the video.
Shuffle Videos – This option allows you to shuffle your videos in random order.
Fix For Displaying Activate Content – This option will remove the need with Internet Explorer to have to click to active the control for the Video Player.
Once you have set up the video options, the next step is adding a video clip of your choice. This option is selected from the main tool bar. This video may be in one of the following formats: MPGs, AVIs, MOVs, FLVs and WMVs. The application will check if you have the required codecs and offer you three quality levels. It will warn you if the file size is over 100Mb, and refuse to convert the file if the file size exceeds 500Mb. Bigger videos will take a while to convert. Once converted, the integrity of the conversion can be checked using the preview option.
The video is saved in the proprietary CoffeeCup Web Video Player format (.xml). Once this file has been created, then you can upload the 11 video files to your server, and add the HTML code to your HTML.
The tool works very smoothly in my experience although I have not tried it with huge files. The results are very effective and can be seamlessly integrated into existing HTML code.
Browser compatibility is less of an issue with the option in version 5 to run automatically in Internet Explorer, however, the supplied HTML code suffers from the same W3C compliance issues as the HTML generated by CoffeeCup Firestarter. A more reductionist code can be used which will meet W3C requirements:
<object data="video.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" height="500">
<param name="movie" value="video.swf" />
</object>
With this slight reservation, the tool represents a very effective way for home office users to add videos to your web site.