Configuring Flowplayer

Since the other thread made it clear I need to improve the player no my tube site, I’m trying to dig through Flowplayer to get things to work the way they need to.

My approach will be to put everything in an iFrame and have people embed the iFrame. BUT Flowplayer puts a little embed icon in the upper left corner. That doesn’t give the person the iFrame URL I want them to embed, but rather the div/script version that’s part of what I have in the iFrame. The issue is that the video URLs (for RTMP and HTML5) that I have inside the embed script won’t be stable URLs. For HTML5 I’m going to implement mod_auth_token (similar to mod_secdownload on Lighttpd) - so the URLs will be constantly rotating. Only the iFrame version of the embed will work. And I need to look into doing something similar with RTMP. I could disable the little embed icon, but that’s sort of counter productive - I want things to be able to go viral. If I don’t change the URLs people will start linking to the files/streams and I’ll be paying for someone else’s bandwidth and not reaping any benefit.

The other issue is that I was planning on using Flowplayer’s player logo functionality. They have it appear at all times when the video is embedded on another site. I was planning on changing that so it only appeared on mouse over (so it didn’t look so much like a watermark). I know a logo in a player toolbar is more in line with what sponsors really want, but I was trying to keep things simple - Flowplayer Minimal doesn’t even have a player bar.

Is a custom skin the only way around those two issues? With a custom skin I could 1) have a bar at the bottom and 2) the bar could contain my logo with a link to my site and 3) an embed icon could be in the bar or where Flowplayer puts it.

Thoughts? Any better strategies?