STREETFIRE BLOG

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Add random fresh content to your MySpace or Web Page with the Video Preview Widget

I had a lot of fun making that preview widget in the title bar of this page. What it does, is it looks through new video submissions to StreetFire (well the ones that have been moderated), pulls their thumbnail and then places them into this rotator. It does this based on an RSS feed from the main site, and will work with other RSS feeds as we add them. Soon, you will be able to pull an RSS feed for just the latest Camaro videos if you want, or an RSS feed for the featured drift videos. But what better way to see the results of such an RSS feed than by watching it real time with the widget above placed on your website?
<embed src="http://videos.streetfire.net/previewrandom.swf" flashvars="urlRSS=http://videos.streetfire.net/rss/rss2.asp" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="428" height="320" scale="exactfit"></embed>

To place a video preview widget on your web page, place the following HTML code onto your page. I've also included the ability to customize the look and feel by added extra information to the "flashvars" statement in the embed tag. Here is a list.
  • videolines=false //Inerlacing Filter on/off
  • videoshade=false //Video Shade effect on/off
  • videoquote=false //Determines whether Quoted text shows or not
  • videolink=true //Link entire image rather than just the text
  • videofont=Arial //Change the font of the quoted Text (choose any font name)
  • videofontsize=10 //Change the Size in pixels of the quoted Text (Choose any size)
  • videoloop=false // False shows just one thumb instead of many

The above are optional, and you can add multiple "flashvars" to a single EMBED tag. In order to do this change the statement to look like...
from
flashvars="urlRSS=http://videos.streetfire.net/rss/rss2.asp"
to
flashvars="urlRSS=http://videos.streetfire.net/rss/rss2.asp&videoloop=false"


Use the "&" to add multiple flash vars together. Note you can also change the height and width of the widget by modifying the HTML code. For example Here is a rotator widget that is resized to 320x240, with interlacing and film-shade filters turned off, quoted text is off, but click-ability is turned on.

Note, you can also just have it show a single frame and not animated by using the flash vars above.

So try it out, play around with it and if you have any questions you can post in our tech support forum and we'll be sure to help you out.

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