Developers - get the player source code
In Step 1 you created multiple encodings of your content for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming, and in Step 2 you created the Swarmcast Media Metadata files necessary to allow real-time switching amongst them. In this Step we’ll tie the various components of our Media Group together by creating a Media Group Descriptor using the Swarmcast Player Wizard and playing it with the
The Swarmcast Player Wizard is an online tool which creates both the Media Group Descriptor XML documents and the HTML snippets used to embed the Autobahn HD Player on any web page. The Swarmcast Player Wizard can be found at http://getautobahn.com/developers/wizard and is shown in the image below.
Each horizontal line in the “Setup Videos” step, corresponds to one of the videos created in Step 1 of this tutorial. The “Video URL” column is the web address of one of the FLV encoded videos. The “Bitrate (Kbps)” column is the combined audio and video bitrate you selected while encoding each video, and the “SMM URL” is the web address of the Swarmcast Media Metadata file corresponding to the FLV in column one, as generated in Step 2. More lines can be obtained by clicking the ‘Add Video’ button. One video must have its ‘Default’ checkbox checked indicated it’s the video that will be shown to viewers without Autobahn HD. It is recommended that you make your lowest bitrate video the default. After completing the “Setup Videos” form click the “Next” button in the bottom right.
You’ll now see your Media Group Descriptor file in a scrollable text box. Copy it to clip board or download it using the provided buttons. If you’ve copied the descriptor to your clipboard paste it into a new text document and save it with an appropriate name for your Media Group, for our example we’ll use ElephantsDreamAbbr.xml. Once you have your Media Group Descriptor on disk you’ll need to upload it to your web server. Put the URL for the resulting file, in our example http://showcase.swarmcast.com/ElephantsDreamAbbr.xml, into the “Media Group URL” input field and click “Next”.
Step 3 of 4 allows you provide some basic parameters that affect the appearance of the embedded Swarmcast HD Player. All fields, excepting width and height, are optional. The “Autoplay” check box specifies whether or not the embedded video should begin playing as soon as the user arrives at the page. The “Image URL” field provides the location of a static image to display when the video is not playing. Any provided “Caption Text” is displayed as a title for the video. The “Background Color” hex triplet is used to allow the embedded Autobahn HD Player to blend into the web page onto which it is placed.
After filling out the appearance and behavior settings in step 3 and clicking “Next” the Object/Embed tags are displayed in the scrolling text box. These tags can be copied and pasted into most any web page to embed a full featured Autobahn HD Player with Adaptive Bitrate Streaming. If you prefer the SWFObject option at the top my be selected to provide embeddable javascript code that is more flexible than the Object/Embed tags but cannot be embedded into web pages without also being able to modify the page’s <head> tag. All of the files referenced above can be found in the archive at http://showcase.swarmcast.com/AutobahnAdaptiveBitrateStreamingExample.zip.
It should be noted that the Adaptive Bitrate Streaming and other features of Autobahn HD are not limited to use within the Autobahn HD Player. In the future we’ll be posting a series of entries showing how Autobahn HD’s Adaptive Bitrate Streaming can be included in the Flash based Media Player of your own authoring.
