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About a year ago, I was seraching for alternative Video players for a client project. I discovered some brillant work created by Jeroen Wijering. Jeroen is a free lance designer/developer that has done some outstanding work with web media.

He had several examples of video and media players that, to be quite honest, had me spending several hours learning how to configure the js, xml, and web presentation files.

Recently, I had received an email from Hrvoje Komljenovic. the CEO of Considero and a DotNetNuke module developer in the Republic of Croatia.

He had sent me a copy of of his new module, Alive Media Player, for review. As I explored the module, I discovered Considero has taken most of the complexity from the Wijering set up of video and web media. All at an affordable price.

Here are the module specifications:

Considero Alive Media Player is 5-in-1 multimedia player module for DotNetNuke portal platform.

What can it play?

• FLV Flash video files
• MP3 music files
• JPG, GIF, PNG and other image files
• SWF Flash files
• iTunes, RSS 2.0, ATOM, XSPF podcast playlists
• Custom XML playlists

What are supported media sources?

• It can play files from your DNN server (set folder, single file or playlist to play)
• Play podcasts, files or custom playlists from other web servers worldwide

 What are the module features?

• One click to turn your DNN into multimedia audio/video portal. This is standard DotNetNuke module, easy to install, easy to use. All you need is to add module to your portal and set the player mode and media source through the module settings.
• It uses JavaScript to avoid "Click to activate this user control" message in Internet Explorer
• Module is localizable through standard DNN localization 
• Automatic playlist generation. Just select the folder with media files and it will generate playlist on-the-fly!
• Upload file
• Set the preview image or album cover for MP3 or FLV file
• You can customize width, hight and colors of the player
• Set the dimensions, position and behaviour of the playlist
• Player supports watermark logo image
• If you play MP3 music files, you can enable the graphical equalizer
• Fullscreen mode for images and FLV Flash video
• Enable/disable file download
• Set buffer lenght in seconds. Useful for large files and podcast streaming.
• And the classic player features like volume, autostart, repeat, shuffle...

Try-Before-You-Buy

If you are a midnight developer who likes to spend the evening digging through code, visit Jeroen's site. If you need a quick video and media solution, I would recommend you explore the Considero Alive Media Player.

Fully functional trial version is available at here.

So far, I have found the module to be stable and fairly easy to set up. I wanted to give it a solid test and connected the video files to Amazon S3. I wanted to test it on Amazon S3 with some high quality videos produced by Jive Media due to the fact that Amazon server loads can fluctuate during the course of the day. I also tested it with videos being pulled from our dedicated servers and found it to be very fast loading.

You can view our demonstration here

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