By configuring the FLVPlayback and FLYPlaybackCaption components, you can quickly assemble a highly accessible video solution without writing a single line of code. The FLVPlayback components come with more than 20 skin configurations; except the one I needed under+play+rewind+progress+mute+ caption+fullscreen combo.

No worries. Instead of using one of the provided skins, I used the individual player control components and built the required combination. It was very easy to skin by drilling into each movie clip and changing the states like one would edit any movie clip.

This YouTube-like design also required a custom time display and 2 large buttons that doubled up the play and rewind functionality, and thus I decided to class out the components and see how they behave as part of a class [download my YouTubeLikeComponentPlayer.as ].

When placing and naming movie clips on the stage, it is important to turn off the “Automatically declare stage instances” setting:

Declare them in your document class as public variables. For instance, my rewind component would be declared like “public var rewind_cp:MovieClip;”

I did not need to code any of the FLVPlayback functionality such as play, stop, or progress; all I had to do was listen to enter and hijack some of the activity to get the desired results.

I discovered a strange issue with the captioning text. If you use the example provided with Flash CS3 to reposition the text field outside of the embedded Flash Player, when the user changes to fullscreen mode, the text will appear in the centre of the screen and not the bottom! You need to listen to Event.ENTER_FRAME event to position the caption not the CaptionChangeEvent.CAPTION_CHANGE which may happen well after the user has escaped fullscreen.

In the end, I actually decided to abandon the caption-outside-video feature [I was trying to squeeze it in too late in the game and simply ran out of time as it also impacted on the player design ] and left it in the default position, but its good to know that I could send the text to a custom captioning display. In the future, I’ll definitely recommend that solution so that the player could react and slide out a slick captioning panel.