I have tried a couple of the free flash mp3 players and they're nice, but they download the mp3 file to the cache. I'd rather let it stream than save to client.

I can't seem to get the standard players to look good and have good controls when embedded. Medaplayer, quicktime, etc get ugly....

I like the myspace player, it has some good features. Anyone know of a flash player like it that has option to only stream?

hmmmm... As a good resource, try looking at www.flashkit.com

Thanks for that link, it was looking interesting, then froze my pc hard reboot when i hit play on a demo....

well, i thought i was streaming with m3u, but not really, that just starts the player up as soon as you click and maybe it starts before ending download...but i just tested it and it definitly caches the mp3...i just tested in in firefox and ff tells you that it dL'd something every time....

I also found this at Community MX? just found the site today:

..."MP3 files, when loaded over HTTP, are downloaded in their entirety and cached on the user's system. If you don't want users to be able to play MP3 files outside of your Flash movie, you won't be able to stop them.

• While you can begin playback of an MP3 file before the entire file has downloaded, you can't skip to any part of the file that hasn't already downloaded into the player.

So, in summary, serving MP3 files over HTTP limits the extent to which you can manage protection for those files, or use of those files outside of your Flash movie. (You might also see this protection referred to as DRM, or Digital Rights Management.) Luckily, you have another option for serving MP3 files: Comm Server.
..."

So i guess i can't do it w/ flash either and i didn't look into it more, yet, but i bet this flash comm server isn't free and i don't have a player to connect to it anyway... so i'm back to being stuck w/ cached downloads.

myspace must be streaming w/ the extra server component on their flash player.

If you are developing on a windows plateform (XP / 2000), Windows Media Encoder is a free download utility in which you can capture / convert a media file for streaming purposes.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en


However; I don't know if you require a dedicated media streaming port for protected media streams, or if the free version of WME allows protection of downloded media content. Its worth a shot tho!

I'll have to take a look at that, but currently I'm running a LAMP server locally...

I just did something tho, i deleted all the mp3 and m3u files on my client and tried the old way of linking to a text file w/ .m3u extension that just contains the .mp3 link, and winamp did stream, didn't put anything locally, but the m3u file!

I checked it while it was playing and it was counting the stream from the server and not caching anything.

later on, i'll see if that type of link works w/ flash players, but i doubt it would.

I might just give the user an option of playing a stream w/ an external app, (and i'll have to test this w/ the others too like real, quicktime, media player) or no wait, i'll just check how i can clean up the embeds for those players and maybe give an option to spawn them external to the browser if it's not working for them. I could have done this but had to trouble shoot why my 2 dvdrw machines didn't continue the Matrix after 1:40:00 but my old one did but that's for another forum...

Hi, I use wimpyplayer (works for me). It's not free, but there's a Demo version you can try. The full version Is not very expensive.,,, by the way.....cheers!

http://www.wimpyplayer.com