LexArrow - it’s in your mind…

Yellooo there. Mozilla wants to establish a world record for downloads/24h. What’s to download? Firefox 3! I’ve been using it since Beta 3 and I had no problems whatsoever. It’s faster than Firefox 2 and with a lot of new features. INJOY!

I was looking to add some media content to my blog and I found coolplayer, but the installing information was in Chinese. I got lucky, as I found another site, so I pretty much copy/paste the text there

The plugin supports the following formats:

Google Video, Youtube Video, vSocial Video, ASF, ASX, WM, WMA, WMV, WAX, WVX, OGG, APE, AVI, MID, MIDI, WAV, SWF, SPL, MP3, FLV, RM, RMVB, RA, RV, RAM, SMIL, PDF, FDF, XFDF, XDP, XFD, MOV, QT, MQV, MPEG, MPG, M1S, M1V, M1A, M75, M15, MP2, MPM, MPV, MPA, FLC, FLI, CEL, RTSP, RTS, 3GP, 3GPP, 3G2, 3GP2, SDV, AMC, MP4, SDP, GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG, XPM

The plugin is suppose to work with IE, Firefox, Opera, and other browsers. I can confirm it does work with IE, Firefox, and Opera.

A nice feature about the Cool Player is being able to specify more than one file at a time (see my “Let it snow” post). In addition, a user can enter a media url to play by double clicking the bottom of the player.

Let’s get started:

1. Download the plugin here (coolplayer.zip)
2. Uncompressed, upload the coolplayer folder to your plugin directory, and activate the plugin
3. Insert the player code into your post by modifying the code below. Feel free to change the width, height, autoplay, and loop.

<coolplayer width="320" height="240" autoplay="false" loop="false">
<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/yourfolder/blahblah.wmv”>Your Video Title</a>
</coolplayer>

The plugin does not like single quotes in the title so don’t use them. If you want to include more than one media file, just add another line between the coolplayer tags:

<coolplayer width="320" height="240" autoplay="false" loop="false">
<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/yourfolder/filename.mp3″>Your MP3 Title</a>
<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/yourfolder/blahblah.wmv”>Your Video Title</a>
</coolplayer>

By default, the player points to a RPC server in China. You can improve the performance by downloading the server to your own site:

1. Download the RPC serverhere(coolplayer_rpc.zip)
2. Uncompressed the files to your coolplayer folder
3. You need to change the location of the RPC server in two files: rpc.php and coolplayer.js

In version 8.5 you have to change the following:

In coolplayer.js, change (line #1) from:

coolplayer_plugin_path = “http://www.coolcode.cn/wp-content/plugins/coolplayer/”;

To (line wrap not intentional):

coolplayer_plugin_path = “http://yourdomain.com/yourplugindirectory/plugins/coolplayer/”;

In rpc.php, change (around line #11) from:

$coolplayer_rpcpath = “http://www.coolcode.cn/wp-content/plugins/coolplayer/mbstring.php”;

To (line wrap not intentional):

$coolplayer_rpcpath = “http://yourdomain.com/your-plugin-directory/coolplayer/mbstring.php”;

After you have modify the server entries, upload all of the RPC files to your server - this folder “http://yourdomain.com/your-plugin-directory/coolplayer/” (you don’t need to activate the RPC server). You are now done configuring the files.

When using a media file format, be sure you have the codec for it. Otherwise, in IE you can’t play it (you or your viewers who are in the same situation). Firefox usually finds a plugin/codec and downloads it for you. My suggestion here is to transform akward file formats into something “classic”. I found an easy to use software for rendering called Total Video Converter

I hope you find this useful enough not to post comments for troubleshooting If you still have problems I’d be happy to help you out