The Making of the Macromedia Video Banner spoof
by Graeme Bull


Video in Flash has become pretty hot lately, ranging from the basic home video turned swf to streaming FLV (flash videos) progressively or with Flash Communication Server all the way to having live video conversations in a conferencing/collaboration application. The bonus of making Flash your final output is that it can be embedded cleanly into not only an html page (you can do that with any video file really) but also any Flash movie as well. To top it off, if you so chose to, you can add in interaction with the video with not just stop and play buttons but have it react to certain buttons or areas that are interacted with in the application/web page itself. The possibilities are endless.

Going on that line, lately Macromedia has been pushing Flash video a lot more and started up a new campaign on their home page with streaming video banners. One of these banners made use of Flash Communication Server to stream it out smoothly to viewers and really caught my eye as it was so clear and free of artifacts that I couldn't understand why it downloaded and played so smoothly. Not only that the implementation of the banner in the middle of the page without requiring any interactions topped it off. This article is about a video banner spoof I did on that Macromedia video banner.



Before I get started on this, I would like to mention that this banner is meant as a joke, a spoof on the original banner and for nobody to really take it seriously as a "copy" of the original. I have been very open to the community as to what I created and have no intentions of using this banner in a live site. Also, my procedure of creating this banner may not be the "best" way of creating it, or even what some professionals might prefer, but is just one way of completing a project. To each his own I say. I'll start off with my original thought process, decisions I made along the way, and finish off with what I think I could have done better or changed. I'll try to keep things basic enough that anybody can follow along, so for some more experienced this article may seem a bit long or too detailed.

Take a look at this link to see what we are going to try to accomplish:
http://www.macromedia.com/swf/homepage/fma/en_us/assets/FMA_video_gallery.swf

Here is my version:
http://www.solid-thinking.com/mmspoof/spoofPlayer2.html

So let's get started on what I did to create this banner and what was running through my mind during the creation. To start let's go over what my goals were and what I needed to do to spoof the original.