Finally I found the best solution for my Shout Stream plugin. The open source flash player is here and I can adopt it and use it. It’s the FFmp3 player of Federico Bricker. The open source community found its way again!

- Shout Stream main page
- FFmp3 skins and info

It’s been about two years after i released the first version of Shout Stream plugin for WordPress. All that time i was aiming for somekind a bridge between WordPress users and their shoutcast or icecast streams. But a strong key for the perfection is a decent open source flash player. Flash objects and especially flash players are a great tool. Users without Internet Explorer or even without Windows can hear the stream from a web page without having to open an external program like winamp or itunes. Their disadvantages are mostly the limitation of the type of the mp3 that they can stream and -most important- the famous memory leaking.

That’s why I ve used Minicaster which is a free (as a beer) flash player but not an open source project. Minicaster was the only flash player i ve found that could avoid memory leaking (and a crash at your visitor’s browser) but i needed something more flexible that would be open source so i could control it better and adjust it for specific use. So i decided to take things on my hand starting a simple project which is find an open source mp3 flash player and try to build something dedicating for streaming audio, especially for shoutcast and icecast streams and use it either on Shout Stream or even as a stand alone player. I started trying to fork EMFF player but I couldn’t achieve much as I had to dive deep in Actionscript without time being on my side.

Recently I saw a comment from Chaves suggesting FFmp3. I had my doubts as I ve tried dozens of player without success. I contact with its developer through icecast forums and he confirmed that ffmp3 could manage the memory leak problem by clearing the buffer every hour. I tested it with all my browsers and I got excited! Yeah, FFmp3 can do it in a way without any annoying gaps and it can also works well in any browser, even in Internet Explorer. More than that it handles internet connection interrupts.

FFmp3 is written in haXe, a multiplatform opensource language that can compile and create swf files. I ‘m not a haXe expert but keeping the precious code of Federico Bricker I could work with ffmp3 and change its skin in better way making it a great tool for my Shout Stream plugin. This page is a starting point for my latest progress on FFmp3 and Shout Stream and it will have a link to all the steps i follow till i make a FFmp3 player as flexible as I want. It will also be the link for all the skins/designs that will be made. Comments and suggestions will be open but only in this page leaving all other sections where every step will be described.

Lots of thx to Federico Bricker for developing ffmp3!

Tools and resources that are being used:

• FFmp3 open source flash player.
• HaXe, multiplatform opensource language.
• SWMILL, an open source xml2swf and swf2xml processor with import functionalities.

PS: My efforts with EMFF flash player were abandoned due to new FFmp3 but i ll keep here the first two steps for my history…
Step 2: Empty sound object after stop button is hit or after 5 sec. [DONE: Read more...]
Step 1: First thing is get EMFF and create a simple skin with basic buttons (play and stop) and also two fields, a timer and a counter for the bytes loading while playing. [DONE: Read more...]