Flash Media Player

Since Flash is almost ubiqitous in browsers these days, it makes sense to use Flash to provide these capabilities. The ATAudio product is currently using another open source Flash player called XSPF Web Music Player, which uses the XSPF playlist format to play MP3 files. XSPF is the XML Shareable Playlist Format.

Guenter's Flash player will offer several advantages, as described in an email:

A) "Media", not "Music":
Its not only playing MP3 files. Also FLV (Flash Streaming format) and SWF (so to say a flashplayer in a flashplayer with the features and UI of a mediaplayer)

B) Convert fileformats behind the scenes
We will (not started yet) build a serverside convertion mechanism (based on libs of ffmpeg or G-Streamer), so that we get a preview and a streamable version of any Media a User wants.
This will be primary implemented for the DPT, but it shouldn't be a long way to make it working with PloneMultimedia too.
We'll run into performance issues on slow hardware, so this feature may be optional. When switched of, the user needs to upload mediafiles in one of the three supported formats directly.

C) Stylish:
I'll experiment with flash's CSS Support. Maybe we can interpret basic elements of the Plone CSS on the fly. What would give the mediaplayer a chameleon like behavior: automaticly adapt the surrounding styles, colors, fonts - without the need to touch the flash code once.
On the other hand, the GUI Widgets can be easily manipulated, so that anyone - familar to flash - will be able to define a skin for the player.

D) explicit Open Source:
Thanks to the opensource flash community the mediaplayer will be fully open source. It woun't need a Adobe/Macromedia Flash license to compile it. The whole project is coded in Eclipse. The building of the project is handled by a Apache Ant Buildfile. The compilation is done by OS compiler MTASC and SWFMill.