Gonzalez Video Player

Gonzalez was originally developed for three reasons. The first was to see how much one could do with a Brightcove MRSS feed. The second was to prove that Brightcove players could be a lot faster. The third was to create a video player for a media publishing system I'm putting together for honest by design (the next version of princess of justice). It's Penelope's older brother.

Creating Gonzalez was, by far, one of the most challenging projects I've taken on. Creating a Flash player that handles one title is one thing, but making one with a play list and other features (such as automatic resizing) presents numerous difficulties. On top of those, it's nearly impossible to safely poll an FLV for metadata on the fly. That issue was solved by asking a server side script for metadata while loading the FLV, but I intend to move to a model that pulls from saved metadata like Penelope.

In case you're wondering, Gonzalez was named for, and is actually short for, The Great Gonzales--a nick name given to Mario in Paper Mario 2, an underdog in the arena. Gonzalez is also a more well-known name with the cartoon character Speedy Gonzales. Speed was on of the three development objectives with this player, and so there are a couple of reasons for the name.