Stream FLV files from Mosso’s Cloud Files CDN
I recently had a client come to me with their Mosso account. They are using them for both website hosting and as a content delivery network.
From the brief amount of time I spent going through what Mosso has to offer and speaking with their tech support I was pretty surprised. Their Live Chat support is phenomenal. They helped right some issues with a DNN install and made a few other things clear as well. Their phone support is lacking, which is sad, because sometimes I will get a call from a client while driving down the highway that something is wrong and I’ll need to call Tech Support to fix the issue, but I don’t think I could trust their call center from the experience that I had.
Anyway, this is not a review or a rant on Mosso, this is supposed to be a quick guide on an easy way to stream your Flash videos from their Cloud Files CDN hosting package. Hit the jump fo some mo… sso… HA! See what I did there?
Step 1:
You are going to want to setup your Cloud Files account with Mosso. From there you will need to follow all of the internal information on how to get your files uploaded, etc… I use Cyberduck for Mac and it’s extremely easy to get the ball rolling on this.
Step II:
In your Mosso admin panel, go to Hosting and then Cloud Files. Select the container you are wanting to use that has your videos in it and at the bottom make sure you have the container set to Public. Once set to public, it will provide you a link to that container. The link itself will no provide you a listing of files, so it’s relatively private in that sense. You will need to keep that link handy.
Step Three:
Open up your Adobe Flash and you should be presented with a Welcome Screen. If not, then click File > New.
I chose Flash File (ActionScript 3.0), but if you have an older version, 2.0 might work just as well.
Step Quatro:
Once you have a new Flash file opened up, head back and select File > Import > Import Video.
There you will be presented with two options, the first one is to select a local file, the second is to use a link for a file already on the web. We’ll be using the second link.
Paste in the link you remembered earlier and then add your movie name and extension, so you should have something like http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/c1234/movie.flv
Click the Continue button.
Another Step:
You will now be presented with the skin you’d like to use on your streaming video. You can change colors and there are lots of options as to how you would like for the skin to be presented.
Click Continue and then click Finish.
It will ask you to save your FLA, choose a location and hit OK. It will save both the FLA file as well as a SWF file that carries the skin information for your player. You will probably want to change some of the Parameters, such as autoPlay. You will also want to make sure the white background matches up with the same size as your video in the Properties tab to make sure you don’t have any overhang as you try to place your video on your website.
Final Step:
After you have the background lined up behind your video you will want to once more click File > Export > Export Video
You will choose where you want to save your SWF file. Simply upload your SWF file and the SWF file that generates your video player skin and then you can call the SWF file however you feel best suites your needs. I like SWFObject.
If you have any questions about this post or any comments or point out any mistakes, feel free to leave a comment!
Kyle – thanks for the great post! Sorry you had a bad experience with phone support. It is odd, since the same people that answer the chats answer the phones! They are all located right here in San Antonio and sit with our entire engineering team. Sorry we let you down there.
Appreciate the time you spent documenting this!
Rob
5/20/09 @ 3:03 pmHi Rob.
5/20/09 @ 3:09 pmYa, when I first started digging around Cloud Files I had some questions about how it all worked before I activated the account and got placed on hold for well over 10 minutes for some simple questions. I logged into the account and asked the same questions via Live Chat and got direct answers while I was still on hold.