We believe that the CoSolvent Player will open up a wide range of new application possibilities. We have been using it in eLearning delivery for several years. However, we haven't had much spare time to try it out on other problems. We are hoping that the community will explore and discover lots of ways to make it useful. The following examples are just some ideas that we have to seed your imagination. Of course, we would really love to replace these examples with real-world use cases submitted by our users and customers.

Mix Video Encodings, Frame Rates and Dimensions.

One common problem with encoding video for the web is getting the settings "just right". There is always a tradeoff between the quality of the video and the file size.  Different inputs (such as screen capture, camera work, and SWF Animations) may have different "best" settings.  If you assemble the parts in a conventional video editor, you have to adopt the lowest common denominator or suffer much larger-than-necessary file sizes and bandwidth requirements.

Instead, consider encoding each clip at its optimal settings and using the Virtual Timeline to assemble them for playback.  Each subclip will run its optimal settings, but the assembly will look like it is a single movie. This is one way (arguably one of the easiest) that you can deliver a higher quality product at a smaller file size.

A good example is an eLearning movie to demonstrate how to use a piece of equipment. Most modern machines have computer controllers and the operator moves back and forth between the screen and physical action. It would be ideal to capture the screens with screencasting software (e.g., BB Flashback) and the physical action with a conventional camera. The screencast might run best at 800x600 and 6 fps. The camera video will look good at 320x240 and 12 fps. CoSolvent Player can cut back and forth from one format to another - easily and seamlessly.

DITA-driven Technical Videos

If you use DITA and similar topic driven, single source XML documents, the CoSolvent Player can be used to assemble a set of topic oriented videos into a unifed presentation at runtime. 

This means different sources can contribute sub-videos in different formats to the document dynamically (e.g. using a plugin model).

Video Mashups

Want a fun way for users to mix and match videos, without imposing the load of running a video rendering process on your server?  Then why not use the CoSolvent Player to provide a user mashup tool, our demo (source code provided with the Professional license) offers a possible starting point.

Mix Flash Animations and Videos

If you want to combine Flash animation sequences with videos, you currently have to take the elements into the Flash IDE and assemble them all on a timeline. Then you have to export everything as an SWF. That SWF will have to load progressively as a single file. If the embedded movie clips are long, loading could take quite a while, even though the animation sequences could load and play quickly. Alternatively, you could build a custom preloader/video structure, but that takes a considerable effort.

In many cases (some Actionscript-intensive animations may be problematic), you can just drop the animations and movies on the CoSolvent Player's Virtual Timeline and let it take care of the internal housekeeping. As a bonus, each of the constituent files will load independently and be ready to play as soon as their individual downloading is completed. 

You can mix and match different media types (SWF AVM1 & AVM2, FLV progressive, FLV streaming and, soon .h264) without having to convert or import any of them.

At the very least, you can try assembling your sequence with CoSolvent Player (it takes a few minutes), then if it exhibits problems, you can go to the Flash IDE as a fallback. Most of the time that probably won't be necessary.

Quickly Reuse Existing/Legacy Assets

 Have some really great flash/video assets from a previous project that just don't quite fit into your current needs?  Use the Virtual Timeline, with its dynamic mark-in and mark-out to re-assemble the assets into something new, without opening them up in video (or Flash) editing environment.