Wildly Appropriate

Hacking Myspace... Continued

Feb 14, 06:51 PM

Yes, I'm still screwing around with Flash and MySpace... Yesterday I learned that embedding fully intact Brightcove players in flash movies is really easy... and that any such flash movies are crippled when displayed on MySpace pages. The deal-breaker is the embed tag paramater attribute:

The final step in configuring is to allow script access to the movie. This is also configured in the html embed and object tags. In both of these tags there is an attribute called "allowScriptAccess". This is set to "sameDomain" by default. You need to change this value to "always". Make sure you change it in both the embed and the object tags.

code snippet taken from Brightcove's Developer's Guide

When you set this parameter properly on your MySpace "edit profile" page and save your changes, the code that comes back after the save will have auto-magically whammied the script access parameter. The result of MySpace making it impossible to allow script access in the embed and object tags is that your Brightcover player will show you its loading animation ad infinitum without ever being able to load its UI or the video content.

Is this fantasy I've been chasing where I circumvent the goofy design constraints of a typical MySpace layout by overlaying the entire profile page with a huge flash SWF which then pulls in various external media elements an impossible dream? One small ray of hope:

We had a problem invoking a simple javaScript alert from Flash Player 8 to the HTML page. We created a simple test movieClip with one frame; the actionScript in the first frame was as follows:

getURL("javascript:alert()");

When the clip was published in Flash8 and tested in the HTML page... no alert box occurred. When the clip was published in Flash6 and tested in the HTML page... the alert box appeared.

Our solution was to publish a "java.swf" in Flash6 and in the first frame:

getURL("javascript:alert()"); and in the second frame: stop();

Then, in the main movie in published Flash8, using:

loadMovie("java.swf", "_level2")

We loaded the swf published in Flash6 into the Flash8 player and our getURL() worked perfectly.

discussion thread snippet taken from the Open Laszlo Developers Forums

I don't really care about being able to do JavaScript alerts, but I think the implication here is that actionscript functions and methods that are crippled in Flash 7 and 8 on MySpace might be back in play if you invoke them from a loaded-move backsaved to Flash 6. I'll let you know if this sneaky workaround works.