Blizzard’s Skinned FLV Player

Posted by Jesse Freeman | Filed under Advanced Topics

A few of the people in my office were nerding out and talking about the new Diablo 3 game coming out from Blizzard. I have been a big fan of their games1 as well as their web design. Blizzard has this very Apple like perfectionism that shines through in everything they do from their games, to their books, and even down to their Flash/HTML Sites. That is why my jaw dropped when I saw they simply skinned the standard FLV Player component on their new Diablo 3 website.

Blizzard FLV Player
Something is wrong with this picture.

There is just something so wrong with the universe when I see the default icons for the component’s buttons pop up while the FLV Player loads in. Now this isn’t Blizzards Fault because sometimes its a fine line you have to walk when it comes to quickly getting something up vs having time to perfect it. Since I don’t know the time frame the developers had to work under I wonder if using an open source player and customizing it would have been worth the extra hours of development. I mean look at that site, it is pixel perfect and that player along with the barber shop pole preload/volume background doesn’t really fit.

The real problem is in the FLV Playback Component; from this visual error it looks like they are using the older AS 2 component. I have played around with the new AS 3 one that Grant Skinner had a hand in developing and although it is still a little cumbersome2 , its not that bad. In fact I found the new AS 3 FLV Playback component to be very efficient and not to large, maybe 30k or so more then what I could have written from scratch. I used part of it at as the foundation for Heavy’s home page player and simply wrote my own custom controls/skin to sit on top of their Video Display.

I just thought I would point this visual glitch out because a lot of Flash Developers don’t have years of art training like I was lucky to have and may say “hay, lets just use the default stuff because no one will know.” So much of what we do in Flash is design based even when 90% of the application is being pushed by code. You should still be paying attention to the little design details, thats what Apple does and it hasn’t hurt them yet!

  1. Everything except World of Warcraft – I could never get into those online RPGs [↩]
  2. When it comes to extending it and really customizing the skinning and control layout [↩]

Permalink | July 10th, 2008

  • You have your player up anywhere? I'm also creating one too. What is the SUMO Framework?
  • Thanks for the link Stephen. I have seen the JW player before but never really got to play around with it. I am pushing to release the player I built for heavy along with my new SUMO Framework so hopefully I can throw my hat into the ring real soon. You have a great blog by the way and it looks like I am using your posts a lot on my site.
  • I am the programmer of the open source video player you mentioned and although my player is quite nice I would recommend checking out this one:
    http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Medi...

    It is much more popular and adjusts to any size.
    Definitely check it out.
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