I first heard about the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) while watching one of the Adobe Max 2009 keynote speeches online. As a person who has built a lot of video players, galleries and mp3 players for my work I was very excited that this was being built. I have wanted to work on something like this myself for a long time. Now here was an open source project I could contribute to while building off of best practices others have contributed. Building robust custom players was going to be much quicker and easier.[ad#Adobe Banner]While watching the keynote I looked OSMF up, but it was still in early development. So I just added it too my ever growing research and development document. Recently I found a free ezine called Flash & Flex Developers Magazine and the most recent issue was focused around OSMF. I decided to take the framework for a test drive and while I was at it I would give the API docs a skimming read. Here is what I found.

Testing out the sample code

The first thing I did was try out the examples straight from the magazine. This was straightforward. The samples didn't build anything too advanced but I noticed something. It didn't take very many lines of code to get the video playing. Most of the code was for adding buttons and making them call a single function in the OSMF API. As usual when doing samples from an article I decide to tweak it to see has intuitive it was to do things. Adding and customizing simple playback controls and capabilities was a breeze. I only needed to check the documentation to make sure my assumptions were true, which they were in most cases. For a basic custom player, this thing is extremely easy to use.

Looking under the hood

The second thing I did is something I like to do with a framework I'm looking at, skim over the documentation. This consists of going through each package and seeing what classes are where. For the most part I will click into each classes documentation to find out what the class is meant for. Sure, this has me look at a lot of helper classes that I may never use ( which is a good learning exercise ), but it also has me find obscure classes that might be quite useful in a pinch. [ad#Google Adsense] One class that interested me both for educational and practical reasons was the ListenerProxyElement class. It is actually quite beautiful in its simple use. It is a class that is meant to be extended. The class itself sets up all the listeners for a MediaElement and has them trigger hook functions that you override to handle these events with custom code. I foresee using this in many projects. There are quite a few other things taken care of in this framework, such as handling of a video player that is sized differently from the video content.

Overall, Adobe ( who is in charge of this open source project ) has put together a very useful, intuitive and extensible framework that is still in the early stages. I'm looking forward to see what types of media players I can build now that so much is already handled for me. Is there anything you want to know about OSMF? Have you already used it on a project? If you have can we see your work (and hopefully code)?[ad#Adobe Banner]

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