Overview

CORE and Content Engine were created to make it simple to build elegant, branded video presentations in Macromedia Flash that include advanced features such as captioning and synchronized overlay Flash movies. This application requires Flash MX 2004 and the version 7.x Flash Player.

The close-captioning and overlay events features offered by Content Engine are similar to the cue points feature in Flash 8, but are easier to use, and require no ActionScripting to implement.

Both CORE and Content Engine are compatible with Flash 8 and Flash Player 8, but the current build of the Content Engine application will not support .flv files encoded with the new ON2 codec. I hope to release a new build that works with the new video features in Flash 8 and supports ON2-encoded video in the near future.

CORE and Content Engine are completely free for unrestricted use. Content Engine is a Windows only application, but the CORE .fla file can be used by MAC developers.

CORE

The video CORE is simply a bare-bones Flash movie that contains all of the required components to make a Flash video presentation. It contains all of the required code, (which has been heavily documented), and simple controls which can easily be skinned and resized to suit any purpose. CORE includes all of the features of the Macromedia Media Player component, plus extra functionality for synchronized captions and slide overlays, but is only 18KB, compared to the Macromedia component, which is 70KB. It is also much simpler to customize the appearance of the CORE components.

The CORE components are available as a free download for unrestricted use.

Here are some applications that were built using CORE components and had extra functionality added with Content Engine:

GE HealthCare		IBM Life Sciences		Reading Is Fundamental

Content Engine

Content Engine is a standalone Windows application you can use to create module data files for the video CORE component. You can use Content Engine to create close-captioning for .flv video files, or to synchronize an overlay Flash movie to play back animations in synch with the video.

Content Engine allows you to create four types of synchronization event: showSlide, which shows a static keyframe in the overlay movie; playSlide, which will go to and play a particular keyframe in the overlay movie; pauseForInteraction, which will show a particular keyframe, and pause the underlying video until the user interacts with the overlay in some way; and clearForInteraction, which does virtually the same thing, except it also hides the video object.

Content Engine allows you to create complex .xml script files very quickly and in a very intuitive manner. The Content Engine installer includes the CORE video player components, (uncompiled in a .fla file), a sample project, and documentation. It also includes a free copy of the Buraks .flv Meta Data Injector, which is a useful tool if you are using an older .flv compression codec that doesn't write metadata to the .flv file. Metadata and the use of the meta data injector are explained fully in the documentation.

Content Engine is available as a free download for unrestricted use.

• View Documentation (1.76MB .pdf document) • Download CORE components (1.66 MB .zip archive; includes documentation: right-click and select "save as") • Donload Content Engine Installer (17MB .exe; includes documentation and CORE)

For further information, please contact Chris Ivey. You are welcome to link your site to this page.