We spoke with Senior Software Engineer, Mitch Holyoak, of Sorenson Media, global leader in video compression technology, about the Sorenson FLV Player created with Zinc™ 2.5.
Tell us a little about YOUR ROLE AT Sorenson Media
I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Sorenson Media. I work on our Squeeze product that is used for compressing video into a variety of formats. We support a number of formats such as Flash, Windows Media, QuickTime, Real media, and MPEG.
tell us about the sorenson flv player
Squeeze allows the user to play their compressed video in the default player for the different media types. There isn't a dominate player for Flash FLV files like there is for Windows Media, QuickTime and Real Media.
So, we decided to create our own player and ship it with our Squeeze product.
WhY DID YOU DECIDE TO USE Zinc™?
We felt that it would be best to create the player using Macromedia Flash. However, we wanted to ship an executable not a Flash SWF file.
Our product manager, Randon Morford, had worked with Zinc before and felt it would be a good solution. I got a copy of Zinc and in a short period of time was able to create an executable from a SWF file. I was then able to easily add menus to the application. I had a few questions and Multidmedia was very helpful in answering them.
What aspects of the project could not have been achieved without Zinc™?
Without Zinc, I don’t believe we could have created an executable in a quick time frame like we did. We probably would have had to settle for an inferior solution that just used a SWF file instead. Zinc allowed us to create a player that worked well on both Windows and Mac OSX without having to play videos in a browser interface.
How DID YOU FIND WORKING WITH Zinc™?
I liked working with Zinc. It allowed me to write code so that the player could work as a SWF file or as a Zinc application.
The support forums were very informative as well. I was able to get answers to questions by just searching the forum archive.
What are your favorite Zinc™ features?
I liked the feature to pass command line parameters and open file document events. This allowed us to create a file association to FLV, which allows users to double click on Flash FLV files and they launch our FLV Player and play the video.
I also like the file menus that were easy to add. So if the user preferred to open the FLV files through a file open dialog they could do that as well.
ABOUT SORENSON MEDIA
Sorenson Media is the global leader in video compression technology. The company's innovative encoding applications and award-winning video delivery solutions enable users to quickly and affordably deliver quality digital video files over the Internet. Sorenson Media's video streaming technology is used on more than 600 million PCs worldwide. The Sorenson Squeeze Compression Suite has garnered many major industry awards, including Macworld Best of Show and Video Systems 2004 Vanguard Award, and the firm's compression codecs are licensed by a host of Fortune 500 companies.
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