The new SWFAddress has just arrived after seven months of active development, various contributions and lots of positive feedback from the community. The list of changes includes the following:

• Refactored JavaScript implementation
• New SWFAddress.swc AS3 component
• New CS4 based Splash screen sample
• New Digg API sample
• New up() method for easier deep linking path navigation
• New XSS protection that doesn’t affect special characters
• Support for Internet Explorer 8
• Support for custom HTTP status messages in the SEO sample
• Improved title handling
• Improved unload event handling for IE
• Updated Rails sample
• Fixed getBaseURL() for AS3
• Fixed Safari 2.0-2.0.3 support
• Build-in fix for the Firefox 3/Mac OSX blinking effect
• Additional onLoad fix for application/xml content type
• Fixed optional options parameter for the popup method
• Cross platform build script
• Various optimizations

I believe that this new version is pretty stable and won’t require an update soon. There are two known Safari bugs (19202 and 20355) that currently affect the project and we can only hope that they will make it’s way into the next major release of the browser.

SWFAddress has grown significantly in the last two years and it’s very likely that we’re going to provide a lite version for users who need just the basic functionality. Very soon the same API will become available for Silverlight and we’re also scheduling the development of a jQuery plugin.

• Post about the release
• Download SWFAddress 2.2

To get Flash and Unity3D to talk to one another in an HTML/XHTML page is pretty simple with javascript and with the internal Unity3D Application object and the ExternalInterface in Flash.  But there are lots of elements of that communication that can be consolidated and reused so you don’t have to recreate that over and over.  Various studios and programmers come up with their own kits but when it becomes a shared activity to get the best integration and make it more of a platform that is where things like swfobject, swfaddress and u3dobject come in.

So far swfobject is the standard for flash html embedding and unityObject is a similar take (but a bit dated) on that but now we have u3dObject that is open as well and a more official open source project for unity3D <–> flash integration and test harnesses for development when those two technologies are used together.

Unity3D <-> Flash Embedding Info:

• u3dobject hosted at google code
• Older unityobject from unity3d wiki (outdated)
• Recent post on the same topic and some examples from Paul Tondeur
• ExternalInterface for Flash
• Unity Web Player and browser communication

The sample Rostislav at Asual has, shows how you can incorporate SWFAddress now that the youtube player can be embedded by script, and thus how it can have deep-linking to sections of the video from the url.

So, today I spent some time trying to integrate SWFAddress with the sample YouTube video and the result is now available online. There were some tricky parts and probably the code can be encapsulated better, but overall I’m satisfied with the result. Every pause action or significant jump in the playback produces a deep link which will definitely make sense for long videos or specific scenarios. If you want to automatically start the video from the second verve just try this deep link. For this case I decided that it will be better to disable the generation of browser history and the SWFAddress strict mode.

The sample is available in the SWFAddress repository and will become a part of the upcoming 2.1 release.

The cool part about all this is is makes it extremely easy to add commenting at moments in time throughout youtube videos, enables deep-linking, allows snapshots of not just the flash application but also the video that might be playing in that chapter. This is done on services like viddler and others but now you can do it for youtube videos and this will also possibly start a standard way to do this across media players so that a platform of video commenting emerges.

The integration of SWFAddress is simple, on the normal onSWFAddressChange you just pass in the value to the seekTo call:

function onSWFAddressChange(event) {
  time = seek = parseInt(event.value);
  ytplayer = document.getElementById('myytplayer');
  ytplayer.seekTo(time, true);
 }

Google video always had jump to time params like:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5830318882717959520#01m30s (this is a classic/hilarious Erlang video)

…but this is not very workable with the google video player, also you can always add this to other players but having this ability for youtube is a great leap in allowing a more integrated commenting, chapter and community like feel to video.

Since youtube is so big finally having some more control with the YouTubeAPI will allow much more great additions to the capabilities of using youtube video in many more ways and integration of more great javascript kits like SWFAddress.

The YouTube API is really quite useful. Here are some links of interest:

• Sample Javascript Chromeless Player
• Actionscript Sample Code Loading Chromeless Player