NICE. Are there plans to let 3rd parties extend it?

We've thought about community involvement in the code base itself, but it seems a little awkward. It would be like open-sourcing a web page, which is not generally done. But who knows?

It is designed to be very hack-friendly, though. It's sort of a browser extension, and in that sense it's a platform for page developers to exercise their creativity.

I love it, as you could probably guess. This is a very relevant product.

When you say hack friendly? How so? I just know that there are some feature requests coming. Can I integrate a rating system? I would like to see it like the XSPF player. A starting point to a wealth of design and functional diversity all playing XSPF.

Anyway. Big Big props to you guys. More than anything I think this is illustrates the needed paradigm shift in media play thinking.

like tag, W3C standard should start supporting the kind of tag in html. With this we need not go for flash/js etc.,

tags got stripped in my earlier comment so, posting again -
like 'IMG' tag, W3C standard should start supporting 'Audio' kind of tag in html. With this we need not go for custom flash/js.

This seems like it's a tremendously bad idea for developers and content owners.

This player duplicates functionality found in freely available MP3 players that you can embed at your site. It's dangerous, too, to put Yahoo between your content and your listeners.

James, I have some of the same concerns. Though for different reasons.

I really don't think it is any different that putting Adobe in between you and your listeners. They are both someone else's apps. What I really like about this idea is that there is no need to embed a plug-in. No need to rely on Flash. Just rely on standard W3C technologies.

If I don't like the way Yahoo is taking their player. I can make our own (some reference code would be good). Although I can program my own MP3 Flash player, I need Adobe's software and I am reliant on them for all the feature sets in the runtime. Which is more dangerous?

this could be pretty interesting. It's a nice Flash-based XSPF playlist mp3 player.

All users of podcast.com can create playlists which are available as rss, m3u and XSPF
see mine at : http://my.podcast.com/kosso/playlist/

I take that back. It does not 'appear' to based on Flash. Very clever!

It's fine that it plays MP3 but what about other extensions like mp4, mpv and other flash files. I mean I also wish to play movie files.

I'm trying to embed the player into a product using a mashup. Is there a way to invoke the player manually invoke the player from javascript rather than just using the script include? I need to invoke it this way due to the way the mashup technology works.

Thanks

Simon

A sample page of the player in action would be nice ?

Thanks! It work fine on my page!
http://www.1981.in/2008/01/yahoo-mediaplayer.html

Kosso: The player is designed to use Flash if it is installed. If not, it silently falls back to other technologies, like Windows Media Player or Quick Time, depending on the browser and OS. We have plans to support many other file types besides mp3. We just have a few bugs to work out before that support is ready for prime time.

Simon: We have been working on a solution for loading the player asynchronously. It's got one nasty (IE-only) bug that we don't have a real clean solution for yet. We weren't sure if anyone was really going to use it that way, so we deprioritized the fix. Good to hear from developers like you who are wanting to use it in this way. If we hear from enough developers with similar needs, we may make this a higher priority again.

-Mike
Yahoo! Media Player Engineering Team

Thank you Mike, is it possible to modify interface color in the future? Also I hope there will be more options such like fold/unfold by default when loading. We understand that simplicity is beauty, maybe you can provide different sets of JS files for different effects so we won't worry about the size or loading time. :-)
P.S. I like the comment system of js-kit.com ~

Ura: Making the UI skinnable/customizable is something we are looking at for a future enhancement, but we haven't committed to it yet. Meanwhile, if you are so inclined, you can write your own CSS to override our CSS, although we have no plans to provide documentation for this (and our CSS is subject to change), so you're on your own if you want to try it.

The fold/unfold options you are referring to (if I'm understanding you correctly - please correct me if I'm not) already exist but are undocumented. Try adding this JavaScript somewhere in your page before the player is included:
var ympparams = {};
ympparams.show = 2; // acceptable values are 0, 1, or 2.

-Mike

Mike,

Any chance of getting your asynchronous player to play with in my mashup? It would make a really cool demo for our upcoming product release. Firefox only is fine (for now).

Simon

Simon,

As I mentioned before, the ability to load the player asynchronously has been deprioritized for now, I'm afraid. You're right that it works in Firefox. The bug appears to be in IE only. We would love to be able to spend some more time working on that fix, but the team is currently very busy working on other new features which have been deemed to be of more value to more users.

I guarantee that the project managers have heard your request and are paying close attention to the developer community to see if there are other developers like yourself who also want this feature.

Wish I could tell you something more promising, but for the moment, that's about it.

-Mike

Is there any way to stop people from looking at the HTML source to see where the mop3 files are kept, and then downloading them?

Simon, asynchronous loading leads to a non-fatal but not pretty bug where the volume slider gets trashed. As long as you're ok with that there's no reason to not insert the player asynchronously.

There is a fix in progress.

Gary Storm:

In short, no. The purpose of the player is to offer site authors an easy way to allow their users to play media on their pages, not to diguise where the media is stored. There are a few things you might try, though. You can try creating xspf playlists (see http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com/wiki/How_To_Link#Playlists) and posting the links to those playlist files, instead of creating links that go directly to your media files. However, the end user could still download the xspf file and look through that to see where your media files are located.

If hiding the files is a real concern for you, there are ways to do it, although they require a good deal of extra work on the server side. Yahoo! Music goes to great lengths to do this. It basically involves generating a dynamic URL and accompanying rewrite rule on the server, which expires after 20 minutes or so. Not for the faint of heart, but pretty effective.

Maybe someone else here has another idea that's easier to implement?

-Mike

One thing is that it currently does not work on Linux. The only place I saw about this was here. I've never imagined Yahoo would do this, considering that Linux is used by considerable amount of people, especially on the geek side.

Ooops, html was stripped. So the link that I wanted to post is this one: http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Hi Tayfun,

Linux is enabled in the next release. The general policy is that we don't block it but we don't test it specifically. The goal is to write against a standard and let the browser developers do the same, so what we'll test is whether we work in a theoretically standards compliant browser. I suspect that this will be a buggy experience at first.

See http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com/wiki/How_To_Use#Browser_support

Hi, can i use yahoo media player to open a windows media streaming url or a shoutcast media streaming url??

This is a nice variation on Play Tagger, but what's missing from both is still a playback-position slider. Or am I overlooking that? I've been experimenting with embedding a QuickTime controller bar in front of MP3 links to get that functionality:

http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2008/01/1-click-web-audio-player.html

Great audio player!
I think I will use it to do my katharsis@psingular