Lory Player 1.1 - FLV, SWF, MP3...

Local .flv player - Use your power!

Loading, please wait...

If in 10 seconds this box is still visible, this is most probably because you have JavaScript disabled in your browser. Please, enable it and reload the page.

So, what's this? A cross-platform Flash video reader that uses the Flash plugin of your browser. It's under a Creative Commons License.
Codename of this project is Lory Player v. 1.1. You can download it from here; an online version (only for online streams) will be online soon here.
It has been tested on Linux (Firefox, partially Konqueror), Mac OS X (Firefox, Safari, Camino) and Windows (Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and partially Safari ). I'm using Microsoft Internet Explorer, so I shouldn't have troubles... It's the contrary, my friend: Internet Explorer is famous not to be standard compliant. You can't even imagine how much time I lost to debug this page only for IE (while the exact same code was working on *any* other browser). However, though most of the problems have already been solved, there are some issues that may still happen if you use IE6 or IE7:

If after loading you see this text but you can't see the player, or you're experiencing a yellow bar in the top of this page, that's probably because for "security reasons" you have to allow every dangerous (:P) flash object in the page; tipically, you can do this by clicking on the little yellow bar and allowing the "active content" of the page. On most systems, this issue shouldn't happen if player version is >=1.1.
If you can hear the audio of your video, but the display is all white (or all black), try to reload the player (e.g. by clicking again on the desidered resolution). This bug seems to be not reproducible, and happens only with Internet Explorer.

How to use it?

Choose a media file (MP3/FLV/RTMP/JPG/SWF/PNG/GIF) from your hard disk;
Click on the player to start playing.

Note: for "security reasons", you can't watch online videos from this page saved on your hd (see below). To watch online videos like the ones from YouTube, you can use instead WatchTube . Why an advertisement is in Japanese? The ads are by Google. Google crawler can only access online pages, not local computers; so, instead of illustrated ads, sometimes you can see the default ones, in Japanese. Don't worry, it's normal and harmless. Why did you do this? If you want to play a local .flv file (tipically a file you downloaded from YouTube et similia), you have to install on your pc a dedicated codec or - even worse - a dedicated player; basically, additional software. However, why installing additional libraries when your favourite browser is already able to play Flash videos? It does it from YouTube, why not from your hard disk? Your browser just requires a "wrapper" for the .flv file. No more DLLs, registry keys, different player for different operative systems. This html page, together with a few additional files, is the wrapper you need. No need to install, reboot or transcode anything (you always loose some quality in transcoding), and you can use the same "application" for every operative system and browser (with a Flash plugin) you have. Which features does it have? You can choose the resolution and the fitting mode (i.e. wich way you want to stretch the image to fit the display) with just one click; with Flash plugin >= 9.0.28, you can use a real fullscreen; you have also all the options of the Flash player itself: volume regulation, seeking, buffering. You can also pause it and start playing again! ;)
No installation is required. Unzip and enjoy! Which formats does it support? FLV, SWF, MP3, RTMP, JPG, PNG, GIF. If you're wondering why you should use this to view a jpeg image, I can say you that in an advanced use you can manage playlists, image transitions, audio dubbing, and more. "Advanced use"? What do you mean? While the "wrapping" html page is very simple, the player itself supports many advanced options. It supports playlists, many media formats, transitions, and so on. Unfortunately, I don't have the time neither the tools to make non-experienced users use all the possible features of the player (e.g. I can't save playlist files from JavaScript). If you have the will to do it, I can give you some support in doing this, but not much time.
If you're a geek and you want to use advanced features right now, just go here and be prepared to work with html code; for example, you can write an xml playlist and give it to the player, and it will work...
If you're not ina hurry, WatchTube will have soon this advanced features. Did you write it all? No: the player itself is Flash video Player 3.8 from Jeroen Wijering. I just wrote the html page and some Javascript code to make it usable by non experienced users. And, above all, I had the idea of an offline local .flv reader... =) Known issues? Improvements?

Changing the display resolution is not done "on the fly", but implies to restart the video (this is because Adobe policy is to block JavaScript controls for local pages, for security reasons);
Again, for Adobe security policy, you can't actually access remote files from a local .swf object (if you want to watch online streams, you can use WatchTube);
If your Flash plugin is older than 9.0.28, you can't use the real fullscreen (the button doesn't even appear), but you can still enlarge the player and set your browser to fullscreen (for Firefox, press F11);
Seeking is possible only if there are keyframes inside the video stream (this is a Flash limitation), and unfortunately YouTube injects in the video just a few keyframes (about 1 each 5 seconds or at scene change);
When there are no metadata (e.g. size informations) inside the video stream, a disproportional overstretch is always used, despite the user choice (to do: disable fitting options when this happens); unfortunately, YouTube metadata injector often supplies undefined metadata. In this case, you use a customized resolution to best fit the video aspect ratio, or you can use an external program to correct metadata (for Windows platform, I suggest flvmdi, useful also to add some keyframes).

Who are you? My name's Eugenio. My email address is jfrusciante at tiscali dot it (useful if you want to say me "Great job!" or "It sucks 'cause..."). I'm currently managing two blogs:

The Ubearable Lightness of Bit
Dall'Irminio all'Aura (in italian)

The old website, no longer updated, is http://googleplex.altervista.org. Other projects are coming soon...
Pssst! Take a look at WatchTube, online soon! What is The Matrix? A movie.

Error: couldn't load the player. Possible causes:

You're missing the Flash Player plugin (required to use the Flash player);
The connection is too slow or the web page is damaged: please, try to reload the page;
JavaScript is disabled; please, enable it and reaload the page. Thank you.