How to use the Brian Madden Media Player

When you buy a Brian Madden e-Learning course, the application that you'll use is a media player that we built specifically for e-Learning environments. The main interface looks like this:


(click the image to view a sample video in a new window)

This media player has several features, including:

  • It can play the "talking head" video side-by-side along with the screen video.
  • You can stop, start, and jump to any time.
  • Little black dots show up in the time bar along the bottom that represent bookmarks you can click to jump to a specific sub-topic in the video.
  • A playlist shows all of the modules at are available.
  • You can click an "Ask a question" button to post your questions to the instructors via the web.
  • The player can be dynamically re-sized. The screen videos are recorded at their native resolution of 1024x768, and the talking head video is 320x240. This means that you can maximize the player on a very large screen and the videos still have perfect resolution.

Due to limitations of Flash Video support in the Flash player for Mac, this media player is a Windows-only application. (This breaks Brian's heart since he's a Mac user.) However, we've tested this application running on a Parallels-based and VMware Fusion-based Windows XP VM on an Intel Mac, and it works great. (Seriously! Full frame rate, full resolution.) So that's our "Mac support" for now. Hopefully now that Adobe owns Flash the next Mac Flash player will have better FLV support.

How the application is laid out

This diagram shows the main areas of the Brian Madden Media Player.

The "talking head" video

This is the video camera recording of the Brian. Whatever he did or said in class, you'll see here.

The Screen Video

This is the actual recording of the screen that is displayed to the students in the classroom. This was recorded digitally via software running on Brian's computer, so it is full resolution. This screen video includes a mix of live server administration, white board drawings, and web surfing.

The Playlist

The playlist contains a listing of the 14 modules that make up the 5-day course. Since this e-Learning course is based on an actual recorded class, you'll note that some modules are broken up into multiple parts that correspond to the live class breaks and days.

The "Ask a question" button

This is the real key to what makes this e-Learning course different from other CBTs. If you click this button, a web form pops up where you can send your question directly to Brian and his colleagues.

The player controls and the scrub bar

The play / pause control is pretty standard. We also have the "scrub bar" that you can click in to jump to any point in the video. You'll notice that the scrub bar has little black dots in it. These correspond to bookmarks within the videos themselves. You can mouse over the dot to see a pop-up of what that topic is. This makes it easier to jump around and view the sections first that are most important to you.