Hi. this is my first post here.
I'm using an existing Flash widget but would like to add more functionality to.
The Flash widget is a basic audio player with limited functionality. As I don't have any control over how the widget was built, I'm unable to directly communicate with it but I'd like to detect when it's stopped streaming so I can modify other parts of the page.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Unless the developer of the flash widget implemented it with JavaScript in mind, you're out of luck.
Since you say you can't directly communicate with it, sounds like they didn't intend for you to do so.
Agreed, you can experiment with loading that SWF into another SWF you make yourself and adding event listeners and see if you can figure out a way to get some sort of events and then link that to you javascript, but this would be a mess to do.
If at all possible, consider switching to a Flash player that does expose all kinds of events to you. I am a huge fan of flowplayer, as I have used it successfully in some recent projects and it lets you do just about anything under the sun to it via Javascript (start player, stop player, load video, playlists, and more).