Last year, following a request on the Captivate User forum, I created a free widget that could display a Youtube video inside Captivate. It’s a simple widget that works well but that has one major drawback: it can only play one Youtube video per Captivate project. It seems that the Youtube Player that I used doesn’t work when more than one video is loaded inside Captivate.

I always wanted to try again and find another way of doing that widget to see if I could not get around that limitation. Well, a few days/weeks ago, I was able to try again and I succeeded in loading more than one Youtube video on a slide and having different videos on multiple slides. Take a look at following example but make sure you only use the playbar buttons to control the movie otherwise you can have some issues. I know that there are a lot of things to work out but it’s a start!

Multiple Youtube Videos Demo

I will keep you posted on the progress.

Yes it is indeed possible!

Like so many people, I had the need to customize the skin for the FLV player in Captivate. I initially thought that this was going to be very simple as I just needed to change the movieclips in the Skin fla file; just like we do for a playbar. However, the FLV skin source files are nowhere to be found on the Captivate installation folder. A quick search over the web and poking a few followers on Twitter confirmed that the fla files were not provided.

Hum … that’s unfortunate but not enough to stop me. So, I decided to experiment with creating my own skin … and succeeded! It’s not very complex but there are a few things to be careful about. The skin swf file basically contains one movieclip per button state (up, over, down, disabled) and one actionscript function that tells Captivate how the player will behave and where the buttons will be located. The key is the movieclip naming convention. The assets need to have some very specific names such as play_mc, pause_mc, stop_mc, etc.

Below is my test skin where I set the skin mode option to true so it hides the buttons when they are disabled. I could have also set the mode option to false and all the buttons would have been displayed all the time.

I will take a few more days to try to come up with some tutorial on how to create the FLV skin so stay tuned for an upcoming blog post!

New FLV Skin Sample Live Preview

I realized today that I posted the first release of CpGears on Google Code about six months ago. Can’t believe that my baby is already 6 months old. I use it to develop all of my widgets and really like it.

I know that Jim at CaptivateDev.com is also using it, has always nice comments about it and even blogged about it. I couldn’t ask for a more dedicated user! However, I would really like to know if other people are finding it useful and what they think about it. Did it help you create widgets faster? What do you like and what don’t you like?

If you use or have used CpGears, I would really appreciate if you could leave a comment. And if you never used it, then what are you waiting for, download it now!