Flash Video Kiosk

I have recently worked on a generic video kiosk. It was tied to a music playlist coming from a legacy application. On the server side I wrote a socket server (in PHP) to interface with this legacy application and then be an XML socket server for the front-end clients, which used flash 8. Part of the job of the back-end was to convert the Japanese text from Shift-JIS to UTF-8 encoding. Both back and front ends ran on Windows.

On the same project I worked on the actionscript for the front-end flash client. This was primarily for handling parsing of data files and screen transitions, driven by the playlist coming from the back-end. But in fact much of the time spent on the project was fighting flaws in flash: memory leaks, irrational behaviour when loading embedded fonts, and CPU load when running full-screen video.

I used Actionscript 2 for this project, using mtasc and swfmill, on a linux machine. Testing was done partly on the target Windows machine, and partly using the Flash 8 Windows player under wine on linux.

I also used Screenweaver, which is a tool to turn a swf file into a Windows exe; it is more useful than the projector that flash can make as you can add custom actionscript commands to control window size and visibility. The primary use of Screenweaver in this project was to allow the flash window to be invisible initially while the fonts loaded and it connected, and to position itself on a 2nd monitor (a wide-screen TV).