I've been asked many times if it is possible to make a bumper play in the middle or at the end of the main video, instead of the beginning. The short answer is "no" ... but using the Player API, you can produce a convincing imitation.

Logo overlays can be added to individual videos, or you can add one for all your videos in your account settings, and then override the default one for individual videos. You can also create your own in BEML or using the Player API, however. The advantage of this is that you can then get programmatic control of the logo.

Want to make a video loop indefinitely?

Here's another use case for resizing a player: you want as large a screen as possible for the video while it's playing, but you don't want to give up all that real estate on the page when a video isn't playing.

Here's a tip for using the Player API to get information about the current video.

What if someone deletes the wrong video, or forgets to add videos to a playlist, so the player on your home page has no content? You can handle this situation through the Brightcove Player API by listening for player load errors and taking programmatic action. You can see a sample page that demonstrates this -- in this case the player is simply hidden by changing CSS properties if it has no content. The works for both single video and playlist players. View the source code to see how it's done.

In coordination with our latest release, Brightcove 4.2, we have also published some new documentation in our knowledge base which helps our users get the learn and get the most out of Brightcove 4.2's new feature set.

Though many new and powerful features were included in the August 14th release, I've only highlighted a few new feature documents which are must-reads for every Brightcove customer. 

Brightcove 3 players offer optional cross-promotion of related, newest and most viewed videos within the information screen. This screen can be displayed as an end-cap when a video completes. Now, you can dynamically and programmatically control what videos are surfaced in these lists. Check out this new help topic, which describes how to use the new Player API methods, released with Brightcove 3.2, that control which additional videos get displayed.

A new article in the Brightcove Developer Center by Jesse Streb demonstrates a custom SWF component that a tracks when a user has changed the audio volume setting in a player and stores that volume setting in a Flash shared object, otherwise known as as Flash cookie. Using this custom SWF, the next time users load a player, the player uses the volume setting they chose previously. Read all about it.

Brian Franklin describes how you can use the Brightcove Player API to to dynamically set player styles with custom Brightcove CSS strings. This approach helps you keep your content and styling separate for easy maintainability and reuse. Read more...

The Player API's Experience Module has a new method named getStage() that returns a reference to the player's Stage. This opens up all kinds of possibilities. Chris DeGrace examines some of them, including how you can use getStage() to access the configuratiom parameters (like publisherID and @videoPlayer) in the player's publishing code. Read all about it.

We have a new code sample and article that shows how to use the JavaScript Player API to create and remove a player in a page dynamically. Read more.