Hana FLV player – Using the first frame of video as the splash image without full buffering

Flowplayer is the definitely popular free open source Flash player. And I have received a question if it’s possible to use the first frame of the video as the splash image but without loading the full movie.

I tried to search the solution myself when I first developed Hana FLV player. I remember that all the players had the capability to display the first frame of video , but the problem was that they were downloading the complete movie even if the video is not set to be played automatically. So the file was silently downloaded in the background even when the user was not watching the video. And that could be a big bandwidth waste if the video file is big in size. So at that time, I was trying to solve this problem by implementing an option to define a splash image file. But it was another manual job that everybody hated including me.

Now, I did spend quite time researching on this issue. I had some hints from the Flowplayer forum, and here is the long waited solution!

This only works with Flowplayer v3 (player=”4″). Once it initiates the download , it will stop buffering after 1 second. If you want to increase the 1 second delay, change ’1000′ to something else. It’s in miliseconds. So you should multiply the delay seconds by 1000. For example, 5 seconds would be 5000. It means, the video data will be downloaded for 5 seconds.

Copy below tag into your post and do some testing . Let me know if you have any questions.

[hana-flv-player
video="http://pseudo01.hddn.com/vod/demo.flowplayervod/flowplayer-700.flv"
player="4"
autoload="true" autoplay="false"
more_4="onStart: function() { 
   if (!this.bufferingStopped){
      if (!playersArray) var playersArray=new Array();
      playersArray.push(this.id());
      setTimeout( function() { name=playersArray.shift(); $f(name).stopBuffering(); },  1000 );
      this.bufferingStopped = true; 
   }  	
}" /]

Here are the Flowplayer forum links that I used as references.

http://flowplayer.org/forum/2/10163

http://flowplayer.org/demos/plugins/streaming/first-frame.html