monline

In my previous post I went into details about flashvars used by embedded Google videos. Originally I wanted to get that list so I can set the initial scaling mode of a video using a flashvars parameter. Unfortunately this is not possible. Here's why ...

The scaling mode is stored in an internal "sizeMode" variable. It can have the following values: "original", "double" and "fit". However this parameter is not read from flashvars.

The first time a user visits a Google video page, googleplayer.swf creates a shared object (this is a method for storing settings for SWF applications) in the user's profile/home directory (eg. in Windows it's the "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\{SHAREDOBJECTID}\video.google.com\googleplayer.swf/mediaPlayerUserSettings.sol" file, where {SHAREDOBJECTID} stands for an internal identifier of the shared object). Now every time the user changes the scaling mode, the SWF sets the "sizeMode" variable inside the shared object. The next time the user visits a Google video page the scaling mode is read from this shared object.

There's no way at the moment to override with some flashvar parameter the value of sizeMode variable that comes from the shared object.

Btw. the default volume and the smoothing settings come from the shared object, too. What a pity ... it would be fun to embed a video in my page with max. volume ... (of course this can still be done by manipulating the video itself prior to uploading it )