Yahoo has delivered a beta of its new Yahoo WebPlayer, a Web-based media player written in HTML and JavaScript.
Yahoo has
announced the beta release of its Yahoo WebPlayer, a new Web-based media player
written in HTML and JavaScript.
The Yahoo
WebPlayer supports a variety of video and audio media formats and services, such
as Yahoo Video, YouTube, MP3 or WMA (Windows Media Audio). Yahoo officials said
the new WebPlayer is an easy way to add video and audio to Web pages. Yahoo
WebPlayer is the next generation of Yahoo Media Player.
In an Aug. 4 blog post about the release, Alex Sirota,
director of Media Web Apps at Yahoo, said any publisher, blogger or developer
can easily add the Yahoo WebPlayer to their site with just one line of code.
"After the player is added to a site, when a page loads, the player scans the
page contents and adds play buttons next to -playable' items," he said.
"Playable items could be references to supported media or specific recognized
terms, such as movie titles. Once clicked, a play button will open a slick
in-page player that will stream all the detected playable items as a unified
playlist."
He added, "We
take all the complexity out of embedding various media players, supporting different
formats, remembering special syntaxes or even having to find relevant videos to
go with your content, Sirota said. "All you need to do is to link to a piece of
media or mention a recognized term, and we do the rest automatically, allowing
your visitors to conveniently play everything as a playlist right there on your
pages."
Sirota offered
some examples of the playable items on WebPlayer:
To play a YouTube video, just link to the corresponding YouTube page, such as Mike Relm vs.
Zoetrope (links to http://youtu.be/i56XeM0-b8Y).
To play an MP3 file, for example this Awesome
Yodel, just link to it (http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/example3.mp3)
on the page.
To automatically find and play the most appropriate trailers and clips for a
specific movie, just link to the movie's Yahoo! Movie page, for example TRON:
Legacy (links to http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810096458/info). You
don't need to manually go and search for individual video clips. Yahoo
WebPlayer does that automatically for you.
To automatically find relevant terms such as "Cowboys & Aliens"
on a page and make them playable, just enable the "term detection" mode when
grabbing the Yahoo! WebPlayer code. In this case, it's enough to merely mention
a quoted movie title, and Yahoo! WebPlayer will do the rest. It will highlight
the term, add a play button, and then find and play the most appropriate videos
for that term.
And Yahoo will
add support for additional formats over time. You can see these examples live on this page,
Sirota said.
In addition,
Yahoo will provide an API for the Yahoo WebPlayer that will enable programmatic
creation of mash-ups, mixed-media playlists and much more, Sirota said.
For more
information on the Yahoo WebPlayer beta, click here.
For additional documentation of how to setup and use Yahoo WebPlayer, click here.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
Email
Print
