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Page Revision: 2010/02/06 14:28
StateMachine is currently in alpha, meaning that it is not yet feature complete and hasn't been thoroughly tested. Having said that, the release described in this documentation is stable and runs on all browsers, and is published to a stable Url that will not change in the future.
Company Webcast's StateMachine is a Javascript library that provides access to meta data, binaries and streams directly from web browsers. It takes care of all the "plumbing" code you would need to retrieve and display metadata and media streams, allowing web developers to focus on what's important: their own applications.
If you're familiar with our MetaService, you can think of StateMachine as a MetaService client implemented in Javascript. Like the MetaService, it exposes WebcastSearch and WebcastGet methods. On top of that we now introduce "StateMachine", which is designed to make building User Interfaces that work with live or on-demand metadata and streams really easy.
Here are the main features of StateMachine:
- An Ajax powered Javascript library that runs in any browser.
- Find and retrieve webcasts and their expansive metadata.
- Play live or on-demand mediastreams, or elaborate compilations and fragments of mediastreams, with ease.
- Exposes a programming model that relates metadata en mediastreams to a time line, and fires events as a playlist's state changes while you navigate that timeline.
- Transparantly implements Webcast security.
- Transparantly implements mediastream selection based on the user's platform, browser and available formats and plugins. StateMachine currently supports these methods of rendering a media stream: Windows Media Player, Silverlight, Moonlight, Flash, the HTML5 < video > tag.
Here are some examples of what you could build with it:
- Create a completely customized player that's able to play a single live or on demand stream, a fragment from a stream, or an elaborate collection of fragments spread out over multiple media streams.
- Have your website update dynamically as webcasts go live, and display metadata anywhere on your site as it's being produced during a live session.
- Display lists of upcoming or recent webcasts, or playlists that contain fragments of just one speaker or topic, anywhere on your site.
For more information, continue reading the following sections: