Software Review: Flash Video Player 3.7

April 27, 2007 | Comments (0) | Filed under: Reviews

The goal here at Bookmark Bliss is to help you improve your online business and every once in a while, I like to take some time to review services and applications that can help you do just that. In previous installments, we’ve reviewed BrowserCam, Guru.com, and Windows Live Writer but this time, I wanted to look into a software package that can help you build out a powerful video based website.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working with a friend of mine on a site designed to highlight his 3D graphic and video portfolio. The project is still under development, but one of the key features will be an area highlighting his 3D animation work. The goal, is to setup a mind blowing display of his talent, specifically designed for potential employers, and one of the most crucial aspects of this is online video.

In researching tools to help him accomplish this goal, I happened across one called Flash Video Player 3.7. FVP 3.7 is a full featured web based video player similar to the ones you see all over the place these days on everything from YouTube to CollegeHumor. Flash Video Player plays the popular FLV video format, which is becoming more and more of a standard for easy cross platform video. All you need is a Flash plugin (which according to Google Analytics 99.4% of Bookmark Bliss visitors do) and video can be running in no time. You can’t say the same for Real Media, Windows Media Player, or even Quicktime. In fact, a quick Google search can turn up dozens of scripts for converting from all of these formats to FLV.

The beauty of FVP is that not only is it just as powerful and feature rich as the proprietary ones in use on many sites, it’s also completely free to copy, distribute, adapt, and transmit for anyone using it for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons License. If you are planning to setup a commercial resource, Flash Video Player also has very low cost commercial license available for only 15 Euro’s (about 30 dollars US).

So far, Flash Video Player has been ideal for what my friend needs to have running on his site. It’s a very light weight script, and is very easy to manipulate and customize to suit your specific situations. Already built in are a whole host of customization options allowing you to modify something as simple as color scheme to something as complex as randomized playlists fed through JavaScript system calls. Basically, the Flash Video Player may be free, but it definitely has the toolset needed to compete with other more expensive packages.

Flash Video Player 3.7 has been around long enough to have been embedded in almost all of the different free content management systems. So, if your site runs Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc, there is a good chance some of the work in adding FVP has already been done for you with a plugin. Even if you’re writing your site from scratch, Flash Video Player is simple to setup and configure. We had no problems integrating it within minutes of trying it out.

If you’re thinking of setting up a site that requires video playback for your users, you might want to give Flash Video Player 3.7 a try. It can save you a ton of work in developing your own player and is powerful enough for a simple personal portfolio or even a complex YouTube clone like Clipaday (which is using FVP ).

FVP can save you a lot of hassle and trouble, which improves your business from day one. Definitely something to keep in mind the next time you need video in your business development projects. 

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