YOU can keep your TUBE

I’m trying to stick a Youtube into a Flash swf call. Easy enough, eh? Here is the way to do it. I massaged several variations of it. It was day’s end, I was tired, and the code finally clicked in place. I got to do the victory dance: getting out of the chair and scrounging something more nutritious than pickle chips.

The Youtube was sized correctly, landed in the right spot on my stage, and it played beautifully. TOO BEAUTIFULLY. The blasted Youtube wouldn’t disappear when I jumped to another part/page of my timeline. I gave it a day of rest, hoping that the solution would magically appear in a dream. No such luck.

I tried the “turn off the Youtube” fixes suggested by everyone on that thread (the yt destroy call). That worked….NOT. If I didn’t immediately follow the destroy with a load, the thing would hang forever, as if in an infinite loop. I gave up on that path, and decided I’d stream FLVs directly from my site. That was something I wanted to avoid because of the potential for a bandwidth problem.

I have a nice template for a FLV player. There must be something inherently odd about handling sound, because this developer forgets to close the sound when I close the player. The sound stayed on til I migrated to the next FLV. At least this movieclip sound turns off when I moved to a different page. I’ll have to dig into the ActionScript more.

That’s another one of my new acquisitions. I’ve been trying to avoid having to learn ActionScript 2, but I was forced to play with it while failing to shoehorn a Youtube into my Flash. Imagine how much more productive I could be if I actually learned this stuff from the top down, instead of sideways-in. One of these days I’ll get me ActionScript for Dummies. ‘

I’ve been boggle-eyed from playing with this. I could use a good break about now before I break everything to pieces.

In a FLASH

First, I had hesitation about how a Flash site gets indexed by Google. Then I did some research and found that Google will index Macromedia fine.

The next generation of kids is so computer savvy it scares the bejeebers out of me. I bought a Flash template from Flashden. I could not have built something like this from scratch if it took two of my lifetimes. And I’ll bet it took him no more than a few hours to compose. I have serious Flash envy.

Although it’s a very nicely built site, there’s a reason why it came so cheap. The support, as it were, is next to nil. It comes partially documented, aka one page of HTML telling me where to modify the XML and Image files. I had those figured easily. It’s the internals, in the action scripts and buttons that I had to poke around for. And I did plenty of poking.

The site came with two extra navigation buttons that go nowhere and no extra frames to go with it. I have to add those on myself. The FLA source code delivered with the SWF don’t match up exactly. When the FLA is recompiled (or whatever they call that in Adobe lingo), the SWF menu mouseover is skewed by a few pixels. Easily fixed once I found the definition of the navigation menu, which is harder than it sounds.

Right off the bat, the thing is missing three fonts, not mentioned nor included with the site package. It wouldn’t be so bad, but the system default font shoves one of the titles under a photo. The designer says so sorry, you’ll have to fend for yourself. A Google search for the fonts tells me they cost upwards of $20.00 apiece. I found suitable substitute fonts.

For a change, it renders perfectly under I.E. and poorly under Firefox. There’s a big chunky white bar on the bottom horizontal. But it does work fine in Seamonkey, a browser which hardly anyone uses.

I’m sure if he were reading this, he’d take a defense. I understand programmer’s hubris, both from a personal perspective, and having met many such a one in my day. I’m not exactly complaining, just explaining that one gets what one pays for, when one buys from a budding designer.

I think I need three more serious weekends pampering this baby, and she’ll be close to ready to launch. It looks and sounds sharp!  I just need to get walk away from it a little because I’m a tad goggle-eyed right now!