As you WINDEV folks may know the lovely people at PC Soft have their offices based in Montpellier, France.

Wouldn’t it be fun to see Montpellier while you are coding away in your favourite IDE?

I did a bit of hacking this morning after finding a good quality webcam in the centre of Montpellier. Click here to view the website.

The webcam is Flash based and I wanted to create a little app where I can view the webcam and maybe in future include some other bits of information like news from the PC Soft website.

So the first thing to do is dig into the HTML code. Looking at the page code I can spot the embedded flash object as it starts with:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"

The WINVDEV application is a very simple window with an ActiveX component.

You will need to configure the ActiveX component and select the Shockwave Flash Object as the host.

Finally all you have to add is a bit of code to tell the ActiveX where the movie is, which be the flash file ending in .swf.

Usually this is enough to show the video but the website does something slightly different. It uses the FlashVars paramter to pass information about what to play.

So here’s the code which you can add to a button or the Window initialisation:

AX_ActiveX1>>Movie = “http://java.viewsurf.com/manager/Player.swf”

AX_ActiveX1>>FlashVars = "playlist=%3Cplaylist%3E%3Citem type=’video’ source=’%2Fmontpellier%2Ffilm1_HQ%2F%2Flast’%2F%3E%3C%2Fplaylist%3E"

AX_ActiveX1>>Play

Hey presto:

Have fun with this….