ginger’s thoughts

This week, we’ve been working hard towards getting the corporate website for my new company Vquence up. As part of that, we shot videos of most of our key people in an attempt to “eat our own dogfood”: show off our slicecasting technology, which comes as embeddable vquences (video sequences). The idea is to extract slices from a set of videos, collate them together like highlights, and make them clickable - so people can click through to the full length videos.

On our website, we decided to show the vquence with a clickthrough to full-length videos hosted at different video hosting sites, including not just the popular YouTube and Google video sites, but also sites such as Metacafe, Guba, iFilm, blip.tv, Grouper, Gofish, VSocial or DailyMotion.

On click-through, we wanted to have the embedded videos from those hosting sites to start playback directly without enforcing people to make another click on the image. This has turned out as quite a challenge.

Not every video hosting site that supports embedding also supports autoplay. Here’s what I found.

The following sites provide an autoplay parameter for their embed tags (only key components shown in the code):

• youtube:
  <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxx&autoplay=1” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” />
• google video:
  <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-xxxxxxx&hl=en-AU" FlashVars="autoPlay=true&playerMode=embedded”/>
• metacafe:
  <embed src="http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/xxxx/title_yyy.swf?playerVars=autoPlay=yes” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”/>
• blip.tv:
  <embed src="http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/blipplayer.swf?autoStart=true &file=http://blip.tv/file/get/xxxxxx.flv%3Fsource%3D3″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” />
• DailyMotion:
  <embed src="http://www.dailymotion.com/flash/flvplayer.swf?xxxxxx" flashvars="url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymotion.com%2Fget%2F14%2F320x240 %2Fflv%2Fxxxx.flv%3Fkey%3Dxxxxxx.flv&duration=68&autoStart=1” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”/>
• Grouper:
  <embed src="http://grouper.com/mtg/mtgPlayer.swf?v=1.7" FlashVars="ap=1&mu=0&rf=-1&vfver=8&extid=-1&extsite=-1&ml=xxxxxx” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”/>
• GoFish:
  <embed src="http://www.gofish.com/player/fwplayer.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" FlashVars="&loc=blog&gf=true&ns=false&fs=false&gfid=xxxxxx&c=grey
&autoPlay=true&getAd=false&wm=false&ct=true&tb=false&svr=www.gofish.com:80″>
• VSocial:
  <embed src="http://static.vsocial.com/flash/ups.swf?d=yyyy&a=1&s=xxxxxx”/> - be warned though that their player takes a third for menu stuff

I know that both Guba and iFilm have an autoplay feature since the video on their websites plays without the need for an additional activation, but I couldn’t find out what parameters were needed or which other flash player I would need to use.

Revver simply refuses to support this feature reasoning that nobody would want a video to play back automatically without the need for an interaction. Guys - come on! Nowadays videos live on their own Web page. A person that is navigating to that Webpage and knows what they are navigating to shouldn’t really have to jump an additional hurdle just to get your videos to play!

BTW: I was unable to manage to upload a video to Metacafe from my Mac inside Firefox, although I tried for 3 days.
- worked now!

I do not claim to have tested all the video hosting sites out there. But these are a good selection and my current state of experience.

Ah yes: go and enjoy our new site - http://www.vquence.com/ - and don’t forget to check out the videos at the bottom of the front page.