New to web coding, need to design a video interface.

[zerocustom1989]

Hey guys, My professor at school wants me to design a web interface for a project we're working on.

I essentially need to be able to play back video that a user chooses from pressing buttons shaped like arrows. Many of these arrows will be connected to form a string of arrows. Upon clicking an arrow the video will play.

I have 0 experience with web design and only a college junior level knowledge of C++ and Java. (with a bit of Objective C from my iphone indulgence atm).

I'm not sure where to begin with this, I'd like to finish as quick as I can so i can return to learning iphone stuff.

Is it possible to use a video player that has already been coded and just play videos located on a server that are specified by the user via the buttons?

Again, I know nothing about this stuff, just need to create a quick and dirty demonstation interface. (I'd like to use html5 for video though so it can work on the iphone.)

Im not not really sure what i need to learn to make any of this remotely possible. Any recommendations / advice?

 

[Guiguiga]

Good news:

1. you can download a flash video template + its corresponding actionscript for free and use it.
2. you need to create a xml file so flash can pull the tracks information to display

Bad news:

1. you need to use flash technology (no iphone viewing)
2. you need to know some basic actionscript to make changes to the code

--//--

Search on google for: Free flash movie player template

 

[zerocustom1989]

Any Developer environments that you recommend? Also, is there a specific reason why html5 is out?

 

[Cromulent]

Any Developer environments that you recommend? Also, is there a specific reason why html5 is out?

I don't think he meant to say that HTML 5 was out, just that (as far as I am aware at least) there are no open source HTML 5 implementations out yet. Plus HTML 5 is not that well supported outside of recent Webkit (i.e Safari and Chrome) based browsers and possibly Opera.

 

[Guiguiga]

HTML 5 won't be compatible with many people's browsers any time soon. People just DO NOT update or can't update (inside corporations). It's the same if you use Flash CS5 and want to export on flash player 11. Most people won't have that installed anytime soon. So it's all about who will your audience be? If your users will be extremely high tech people who download the newest and freshest as soon as it's available, you'll be fine. But again, if you are not sure about your audience, I'd strongly recommend using technologies that are more likely to be compatible with their browsers. Flash CS4 and flash player 10.

 

[definitive]

are you talking about something like jwplayer? (http://www.longtailvideo.com)

 

[memco]

Grab the code for Flowplayer, fire up Fraise and you should be all set. You may be interested in using MAMP to setup a local development environment for testing PHP, etc. I made a video site pretty quickly with just these. The way I handled the buttons was to create a list of links that would send a GET request for the current video, which is then passed to flowplayer. So the user clicks video1, this takes them to player.php?v=1, the PHP script parses the query string, validates the id of the video then passes the filename of the video to flowplayer, which then handles playing the movie.