More Info on FLV’s in Lightroom Galleries
I’ve mentioned before that you can add FLV video clips to Flash Galleries created with Photoshop Lightroom. One important tip that I neglected to include however, is that the flv clips need to be placed in a file location that is “next to” or “under” the gallery.swf. Meaning that the flv clip needs to be anywhere inside the same directory as the gallery.swf (-the “Resources” folder). It can be in a sub folder though, so you could add a “Videos” folder inside “Resources” and put the clips in there. If you instead put the flv clip(s) into the “bin” folder along with the images, (which would otherwise seem to be the right place for it) it won’t work because that bin folder is not a child of “Resources”.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:15 am
I’ve just started a major new posting of galleries from my trip to China, and was very excited to see the ability to add video to the galleries. Following the instructions on your site, I was able to make everything run perfectly on my local machine, but as soon as I pushed the gallery to my server I started having troubles. The slideshow would hang on the video and not advance any further, or it would only play the the first few sevonds of the video and then stop advancing. I don’t know if this is related to the wierdness of the group.xml file. This file opens with Chinese characters in Dreamweaver; appears to open fine in Notepad, but if I edit this file while in the server more weirdness happens. All my troubles seem to be associated with this file - group.xml - on the server side. Any suggestions on “gottchas” that I might have overlooked? This is a personal project, but I’d really like to expand this into other things. Any help appreciated - thanks for the grea tips!
August 7th, 2007 at 9:44 am
The fact that you can’t open a LR generated group.xml file in Dreamweaver is a known issue related to encoding. It should not be the cause of your problem. It may be related to download issues - especially if you have a slow connection or slow server. The gallery pre-loads images, but not videos (in fact the preloading code does not “manage” video loading) and the gallery may be trying to pre-load images at the same time it is trying to progressively download and play a video. You might want to look at reducing your video data rate (file size). You might also do a “mini” gallery with maybe a couple images and only one video and see how that works online This would help isolate the cause of the problems - it might be simply the video data rate in which case you’d get poor peformance even when no images are downloading. Now, the problem may very well be completely unrelated to loading issues, but that’s the only idea I have at the moment as to what might be the issue.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:57 am
FYI, it is possible that when editing the group xml that you made some kind of error. Although I would think that if the video played at all, then it would be some other issue, but I could be wrong. you might look at the this group file from this sample gallery to see a working video inside a sample gallery
Gallery: http://www.bluefire.tv/blog/FlashGalleries/AMG_samplegallery/index.html
Group File:
http://www.bluefire.tv/blog/FlashGalleries/AMG_samplegallery/resources/groups/group.xml
Group file Notes:
you need define and “imageSize” for “video” node inside “sizes”
You need to call out the video media type inside the Item node e.g. mediaType category=”video” format=”flv”
August 8th, 2007 at 9:45 am
I looked at your sample gallery, and group.xml and I can’t see that I’ve done anything “wrong” here. I’ll try reducing the video rate and see what happens. Thanks.