Last night, I finally succeeded in making the ‘Tagore dance film trilogy’ Facebook application work! The application allows the films to be viewed from within Facebook in full-screen, high definition for $0.99 per film. You can see how it works by going to, for example, www.facebook.com/tagoredance and clicking on the ‘Watch the Tagore dance film trilogy’ link on the left of the screen.
My thanks to the Dynamo Player blog for pointing me towards the explanation of How to embed Dynamo videos on Facebook fan pages by Mickey Bee. Facebook has evolved a little since that detailed post was written in February but most of it is still valid.
I had very few problems following Mickey Bee’s tutorial up to step 10. Then, no matter what I tried, I kept getting the error message ‘Method Not Allowed: The requested method POST is not allowed for the URL …’ when trying to run the application. Eventually, after searching a bit, I worked out that the problem was that my .html or .htm file actually needed to have a .php extension.
Now, it may be that any programmers reading this are already rolling their eyes at how anyone could have been so stupid. The blog post by Vijay Modi which made me realise what the problem was, stated in a matter-of-fact way that “You can not POST to a normal HTML file; the operation has no meaning.” [Please don’t ask me why – I have absolutely no idea!]
So, to avoid any other independent filmmakers having to go through the same struggle as me, see below for the code of the ‘index.php’ file to which the ‘Tagore dance film trilogy’ Facebook application points to. To adapt it for any other film on Dynamo Player, you just need to replace the embed code with the one for your film, as well as replacing the Facebook App ID.
I used OpenOffice to write it, first saving a new text file in HTML format and then using View-HTML Source. If you see ways of improving the code, please let me know and I’ll update this post and the index.php file accordingly.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”CONTENT-TYPE” CONTENT=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>
<TITLE></TITLE>
<META NAME=”GENERATOR” CONTENT=”OpenOffice.org 3.0 (Unix)”>
<META NAME=”CREATED” CONTENT=”20110523;1390900″>
<META NAME=”CHANGED” CONTENT=”20110523;1522900″>
</HEAD>
<BODY LANG=”en-GB” DIR=”LTR”>
<DIV ID=”fb-root” DIR=”LTR”>
<P><BR><BR>
</P>
</DIV>
<P STYLE=”margin-bottom: 0cm”><SCRIPT SRC=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=216256461735445&xfbml=1″></SCRIPT><SCRIPT SRC=””http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1″”></SCRIPT><EMBED SRC=”https://player.dynamoplayer.com/player//playerx.swf?pid=P13ac74dbdd5df86b333ac74d&vid=V2ab734dbdd5dfc9d66ab734d” TYPE=”application/x-shockwave-flash” NAME=”Object1″ ALIGN=BOTTOM WIDTH=480 HEIGHT=271 allowscriptaccess=”always” wmode=”direct” allowfullscreen=”true” quality=”high”>
</P>
<P STYLE=”margin-bottom: 0cm”><EMBED SRC=”https://player.dynamoplayer.com/player//playerx.swf?pid=P08e054db9e512c3a2d8e054d&vid=V057754db9e5130b8d757754d” TYPE=”application/x-shockwave-flash” NAME=”Object2″ ALIGN=BOTTOM WIDTH=480 HEIGHT=271 allowscriptaccess=”always” wmode=”direct” allowfullscreen=”true” quality=”high”>
</P>
<P STYLE=”margin-bottom: 0cm”><FONT FACE=”Lucida Grande”><FONT SIZE=1 STYLE=”font-size: 7pt”>Chitrangada- Coming soon</FONT></FONT>
</P>
<DIV ID=”Section1″ DIR=”LTR”>
<P><A NAME=”fb-root”></A><SCRIPT SRC=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js”></SCRIPT><SCRIPT>
FB.init({
appId : ‘216256461735445’,
status : true, // check login status
cookie : true, // enable cookies to allow the server to access the session
xfbml : false // parse XFBML
});
FB.Canvas.setAutoResize( 100 );
</SCRIPT><BR><BR>
</P>
</DIV>
<P><SCRIPT SRC=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1″></SCRIPT><BR><BR>
</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>