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Thursday
Sep162010
Brandon DavenportT3ch H3lp gets it's own custom Youtube Player
T3ch H3lp gets it's own custom Youtube Player
Yup, that’s a Youtube player up there! — We’ve come to realize that people seem to love the look of our website, and nothing humbles us more than getting some love for our hard work. Here’s the thing — our site may look cool, but some stuff that is on T3ch H3lp doesn’t look cool, namely the Youtube Player. It is a bulky mess of gray goopy poop and we figured “if you guys like the look of our site, why can’t we make Youtube look better in the process?”
Introducing T3ch H3lp’s “Vid3o” for Youtube
The video you see above is hosted by Youtube, and even though we’re still using their player — we’ve made some insane modifications. But you’re probably thinking “you can’t style Flash with CSS!” — but hey, we’re T3ch H3lp and we can tackle anything.
The player is in fact Youtube’s player, but it is a special version of it called “The Chromeless Player” which is a stripped down version of the player. It removes all UI elements, and creates a blank slate that you can build yourself, and style with CSS — But the thing is, it would probably take a seasoned web developer weeks to build it.
No fear! Today, I found a neat article by a guy named Trevor, and he has created a brilliant jQuery plugin that essentially builds the player for you! It takes a plain ol’ link to a Youtube video, and transforms it into a customizable player — but you’ll need a fair bit of experience to get it installed and working properly.
The project is available for free on Github, and requires jQuery and SWFObject to work correctly. There are a few issues with the plugin as of now — like the missing volume slider and timecode, but we’ll add those ourself.
Tell us what you think!
Please give us some feedback on what you think of our sexy new Youtube player via @t3chh3lp on Twitter or our contact page. We want to hear everything you have to say because this is a big step forward for us. There is currently no iPad support (but bet your butt there will be).
We are not planning to offer this as a download — so please check out Trevor’s article over at Viget and download the source for yourself. You’ll be able to create a player just like us!
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