Welcome to Billy's Lab, the development site of Billy Smithers, a web developer based in Hull, England.
jSWFVideo
Now updated to use SWFObject 2 - see a demo
This tool enables a user to embed a video in a site using a javascript SWF replacement tool such as SWFObject, using the original embed code displayed on video hosting sites such as You Tube, Google Video and Daily Motion.
Why use this?
Video hosting sites such as those mentioned above use the Flash player to deliver video.
The recent Internet Explorer ActiveX update means that users have to click on the video for it to be able to be played. The javascript SWF replacement techniques work around this meaning that the user does not have to click on the video to enable it.
It is not just Internet Explorer users who benefit, other browser users benefit from these techniques. The javascript SWF replacement techniques also detects whether Flash is installed and installs the Flash Player if it is not installed or is an older version than required or displays alternative content, depending on the settings used when running the javascript.
This tool strips out the url of the video from the embed code provided by the video host and passes it to a SWF replacement library to display the video/ SWF using javascript.
For a more detailed explanation see the SWFObject documentation.
Demo
See a demo of jSWFVideo.
Requirements
To use this tool within your site you will need to have access to a web server with PHP enabled.
You will also need to download a javascript replacement library, such as SWFObject.
Installation
Install instructions are included with the download.
