How to track my flash video player embed on other sites

Question

Setup:

• an online tv channel with "youtube" like clips and categories
• our own flash video player which can be embeded into other remote sites
• as2 flash player

Goal: To track who's embeding my videos, at least with basic statistics per domain.

Since it's AS2, it's harder to do this. My ideea is that I can create a php page which should be opened each time the player loads on any website; than the flash player can do a "geturl" of the php file which has Google Analytics code or some other decent tracker.

The geturl command could contain a variable like the Video Title which already is included in the player; and this title would pass on with GET to the php file and setup a dynamic page title which can be tracked very well.

Problem: how to i use the GETURL function without have user's browser open a new tab or window. Is there any hidden way to do it?

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this is to use LoadVars:

var lv:LoadVars = new LoadVars();

lv.var1 = "hostname";
lv.var2 = "browsersettings";

lv.send("http://yourserver/script.php, lv, "POST");

I'm not really sure if there are any Sandbox-restrictions for this.

Answer 2

Salut Dan,

Haven't done as2 in a while.

I remember I used mochibot, you could track your swf, wherever it might be embedded.

They might still have the as2 tracking.

Answer 3

The main problem I found is that control over the external information can only exist if there is allowScriptAccess in the html embed code of the , like this:

<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always">

and

allowScriptAccess="always"

In the tag.

This is a bit late for me since I can't tell everyone who embeds my player to add those lines to their site, but from now on... Anyway, someone who wants to hide can easily just delete the lines. So I renamed the SWF file ... and now everyone who does the remote embed has to check back and get the new code.

Here's the AS2 code that worked:

function geturlhttp() {
//urlPath = ExternalInterface.call("window.location.href.toString");
urlPath = ExternalInterface.call("eval","document.location.href");

//both work, try which one is bet
}
geturlhttp();


var lv:LoadVars = new LoadVars();

lv.var1 = urlPath;
lv.var2 = title; //an internal variable, the name of the file


lv.sendAndLoad("http://www.somesite.test/tracker.php",lv,"POST");

So the tracking only works on my own site, not the external remote embedding sites which come up empty or "null" in sql.

And here's the PHP code I made with SQL. I've only made something for the insertion and I'm going to work on display and selection later...

<?php
//POST needs to be secured, this is just a test :)
$url = $_POST['var1'];
$title = $_POST['var2'];

$dbhost = "127.0.0.1"; // almost always localhost.
$dbname = "x";   // Database Name, In our case, its news
$dbuser = "x"; // Database Username
$dbpass = "x"; // Databse Password


$connect = mysql_connect("$dbhost","$dbuser","$dbpass");// Connecting to Database

mysql_select_db($dbname) or die (mysql_error()); // Selecting Database

$sql= "INSERT INTO tablename (urlrow, titlerow) VALUES ('$url','$title')";
$result = mysql_query($sql);

?>