Can CF read current time from a video playing on page?

Report · Mar 21, 2011

I would like to be able to play a video on a webpage and synchronize content changes on the page as the video plays. One example would be having PowerPoint slides change on the page as a video presentation played. Is there anything built into CF that would assist in this? Thanks!

Report · Mar 21, 2011

Not built into ColdFusion, because ColdFusion runs on the server, and a playing video would be running on the client. These computers could be thousands of miles apart.

Now with Flash, Flex, AIR clients, there are probably plenty of ways to do something like you are desiring. But those technologies are covered more thoroughly in forums dedicated to them.

Now if you want to tie these events to new requests for more data from the ColdFusion server, the latest ColdFusion does offer several options that might very well tie into whatever is created for the Client side.

Report · Mar 21, 2011

Thanks for the quick reply. I've seen this done with javascript, but I'm js illiterate. I thought I had seen some .NET programming that automatically wrote the js for you, and thought there might be an CF equivilent. It seems like something like this should be pretty easy to accomplish, but CF alone may not be able to do it.

Report · Mar 21, 2011

BLI10 wrote:
It seems like something like this should be pretty easy to accomplish, but CF alone may not be able to do it.

Yes ColdFusion is very capable of dynamically generating JavaScript code to be sent to the client, and has many wizard tags that do just that. But none for Video that I know of.... let me try a Google Search...

I'm back. There is the <CFMediaPlayer...> that apperently, according to the documentation, includes some hooks for Custom JavaScript functions for OnLoad, OnStart and OnEnd events, but that seems to be it.

I would expect that for more then that, Adobe is expecting developers to create their own JavaScript and|or ActionScript. Now if any developer has done this and released it to the public, I don't know. That would take a more indepth internet search then I attempted.

Report · Mar 21, 2011

I'll look into that tag more, to see if it's been implemented anywhere in the way that I would like to use it. I've done quite a bit of searching on this, but haven't found much. There are services that will do this for you and host the media on their site, but I really need to have full control and local hosting. Thanks very much for your help.

Report · Mar 21, 2011

Lol, running a Google search on that tag brought up this thread. Google must be quick today.

I found a page with some sample code that seems to indicate that I can at least get the current time from the video. That might be enough to get me started, I might just have to learn enough js to accomplish this.

http://coldfusionexamples.com/2010/11/06/determining-when-a-video-has-finished-playing-using-the-cfm...