The last couple months or so I've been neck deep in the world of mx.Controls.VideoDisplay. Certainly a great class, but Adobe seems to have dropped the ball when it comes to streaming. There are several monkey patches (overriding or underriding the base mx classes depending how you want to look at it) out there for the VideoPlayer and NCManager which will make your life easier. All of the patches that I could find have been included in the sample app at the end of this post.

So after playing with the class, using the great FXVideo component for months, reading all the tutorials on FlexExamples regarding VideoDisplay and Justin Shacklette's blog on Degrafa video controls, I decided to roll my own open source component extending VideoDisplay and using Degrafa for the control bar. The result is a component that is far from perfect but it should give anyone who wants to learn a good place to start looking. The component shows how to apply smoothing to VideoDisplay, how to avoid player breaking hangups when loading invalid urls and how to avoid common streaming pitfalls such as waiting until after the source loads to autoPlay.

Note that this component is not complete and may never be 'done' (some missing features include a proper scrubber bar that has a progressive progress bar behind it and a good scrubber mouse over tooltip with formatted time). If someone wants to add features in and make my poor attempts at skinning better looking I'll certainly update source (it's all in svn at http://code.google.com/p/ullio/

Demo app with source view enabled is at http://freeflowingcode.com/examples/flexvideoplayer/

Here's the player embedded with a streaming vid