Quick Flash Tips #2: Handling ‘Load Never Completed’ IOErrorEvent

This is a potentially annoying error that occurs in Safari/Chrome when you hit refresh or close a tab containing Flash content. If you have the debug player you see:

Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2036: Load Never Completed.

It can crash Safari or, in the case of Chrome, show a ‘broken plugin’ screen, shutting down every instance of Flash Player in the process.

Fortunately the fix is easy. To handle it you must add an IOErrorEvent listener to every Loader instance in your project, including the ‘root’ Loader (i.e. the class that is the base of your main SWF).

To handle the main SWF simply add the following code to your base class. In ‘onIOError’ you can handle the error silently should you wish.

root.loaderInfo.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, onIOError);

New open source code repo. First commit: YouTube API Player

I’ve set up a Google code repository at http://code.google.com/p/stinkdigital-flash/ with the idea of releasing some the work I do to the community. The plan is to add simple, encapsulated, useful (hopefully) chunks of code such as utilities and APIs.

The first commit is a wrapper for the YouTube ActionScript Player API. This was created for the first phase of a project we’re working on for Diesel and it basically simplifies working with YouTube within Flash.

I wrote about it in detail on the Stink Digital blog at: http://www.stinkdigital.tv/blog/2010/01/14/youtube-player-api/

Usage example:

var player:YouTubePlayer = new YouTubePlayer();
player.autoPlay = false;
player.source = “lQ3D4CqHbJM”;
addChild( player );

The Dead Weather / Nokia

Along with W+K, we’ve been helping Jack White’s new band The Dead Weather build interest in and broadcast a live concert over the www, sponsored by Nokia. My task was primarily to build a custom video player to be used to brooadcast the Akamai stream on the site, various blogs and on screens in record stores. It needed to be very lightweight and work at pretty much any size. I took the opportunity to create some nice reusable PureMVC classes for the streaming and player build. The player is also in use on the Stink Digital website.

View the live set here: www.fromthebasement.tv/live

Here are the source files for the Model side of things: VideoStreamProxies.zip

They are dependent on PureMVC and, in the case of the AkamaiConnectionProxy, on the Akamai connection package.