ASSPlay is free! And who knows, you just might like it!
Just provide the form below with your favorite Blip.tv RSS feed!
This is the prototype (or proof of concept) version of ASSPlay (formerly the Best Damn Show Player). It is an alternative to Blip.tv's show player and allows users to select other shows, and view the description of the show currently displayed without leaving the page. While Blip.tv's advanced show player offers similar functionality, ASSPlay provides a different user experience in that the user doesn't have to stop the current show to look at the description. Another advantage to ASSPlay is the customizability ASSPlay provides. A website can be setup to use only some aspects of ASSPlay, such as the player with out the show selector.
Thanks to the great work of the Open Source community, you don't have to be an expert to try ASSPlay. But, if you decide to try ASSPlay, there are a few things you should be familiar with. Basic CSS knowledge is all that's needed to alter the appearance of ASSPlay and anyone knowledgeable in jQuery can add the animation effects built into the jQuery library
ASSPlay is a work in progress. Comments and Suggestions are welcome. Technologies/Libraries used are MagpieRSS, jQuery (for their kick-ass AJAX library and DOM manipulation), the Blip.tv API, and good old PHP. A tutorial on how to do this will be posted on BestDamnTech.com after all the bugs are worked out and it has been loosely proven to work in a production environment.
I am currently working on a delivery mechanism for ASSPlay to be used by people who don't know how to code. Ideally someone would be able to provide a few details about their site and they would be provided with an archived version tailored to them. Then a quick unzip and the user is ready for ASSPlay!
But for now if someone wants ASSPlay, they would need to setup MagpieRSS and jQuery on their sites. Then they could download the files I used for the ASSPlay prototype here.
ASSPlay is not without risks. As a work in progress, issues are sure to present themselves despite rigorous testing. ASSPlay can very likely cause minor irritation, especially for users not viewing with a Mozilla based browser.
The biggest caveat to the player is that I'm probably not using the Blip.tv API in the most efficient way. For some reason not all items in the feed have the show player there. I'll be putting some time in learning the ins and outs of the API, but it's good enough for now. Safari seems to have an issue with pulling the margin widths which makes it tough to set the width of the div holding the other shows. Also, it currently doesn't display quite right in IE6 do to IE6's bizzaro box model implementation.