also, to clarify what I'm interested in, is there a way to load a VAST plugin as a SWF at runtime in the Strobe player? has something like this already been created, and if not, what would be the necessary steps to create one? Thanks. I'd rather not compile in the VAST support if it can be added at runtime.

so if I use the MAST plugin instead of the VAST plugin, I will still be able to load and parse VAST documents as well (without any reliance on MAST) ?

I just tried it, and it's almost exactly what I'm looking for, the only problem is that the MAST document has a reference to the VAST and i don't see a way for it to support directly loading in VAST without wrapping it in MAST first. is there documentation of this plugin somewhere? or a list of available plugins?

Hi, yes I did try that, using the VAST document that is referenced in the MAST document. I simply changed the value of the parameter.

Is there a different parameter name I should use to point directly to a VAST document?

thanks!

ideally what I'd like to do is have a generic VAST parser that's not specific to any one particular ad network, so it can be used universally with any ad network that uses VAST, since the number of them is growing and the intent is for VAST to be a standard for video ad delivery. The first one I'd be interested in is DART/DoubleClick.

Thanks

Hi Andrian,

Thanks for your help. I've looked at the sample and I'm actually using most of it in my plugin development.  The only issue now is that it's not being loaded as a code plugin at compile time but rather as a SWF plugin to Strobe at runtime, so instead of having a mediaPlayer/MediaContainer Sprite built in, it would need to take control of the existing MediaContainer in the Strobe player as well as have the OSMF plugin architecture integrated.

Thanks!

chris

Yes, that would be great. I think that should be all I need.

Basically this is the workflow I have in mind:

1.) Load Strobe with VAST plugin passed in to it

2.) VAST plugin loads and parses VAST document

3.) If there's a video in the VAST document, add it to the strobe player (here is where I would need a reference to the MediaPlayer)

4.) if it's preroll, play the ad first, if its postroll, play it second. This requires listeners on the mediaplayer object so we can set the source to the ad or to the main content video.

Thanks!

We could rely on SMIL or MAST to handle the sequencing portion of placing a video ad defined in VAST into SMP.  I'd like to enable VAST support by simply including one plugin. I understand your logic in separating the 2 tasks of handling a VAST response and sequencing the video into 2 separate plugins (1 plugin per task) but it seems to me that having a plugin that parses a VAST response but doesn't sequence the videos or place the ads would be somewhat useless.

If I were to go to the route of relying on SMIL for sequencing, then I think the best option would be to include the SMIL parsing/sequencing as part of the VAST plugin. That way we wouldn't be relying on 2 plugins for one task.

If sequencing via SMIL is the best option right now for sequencing a video ad into SMP, then I'm fine with doing that, I think where I'm having difficulty is determing the exact steps of inserting a video ad into the player once the ad info has been determined via parsing a VAST document.

Also while we're on the topic of direct access to the MediaPlayer, it seems strange to me that this wouldn't be included as part of the plugin API, since taking control of video playback seems like it would be a common use case for a plugin.

Thanks,

Chris