It is the 3rd year of my work on
RMF RDS Widget. The most anticipated and the most frequently requested feature was always the playback of radio stations directly from the widget. As we have widgets as "standalone" applications since O10.50 it was even more obvious to introduce that feature.
But "standalone widgets" feature wasn't the catalyst for me to make RMF RDS Widget play music. Before 10.50 I've made several tests of WMP plugin, but every test had ended with failure. I even managed to play the sound but it made widget window disappear. Opera 10.50 forced me to speed up and execute plans to rewrite some parts of RMF RDS. New version of our favorite browser became even more strict in security policies and that was the reason my widget didn't work (the rewritting was a little bit delayed, because
I still don't use 10.50 as my default browser). I fixed everything and released 4.0 version and then decided to make a new test of WMP plugins.
Opera widget should work with any plugin (when it is enabled by
<content plugins="yes" /> tag in config.xml). However, I'm pretty sure it does not. Flash works OK, there are many widgets with flash objects.
But I don't know Flash and ActionScript. And I don't have Flash. But I know it is possible to make a flash object which plays radio. I googled and didn't find any which would meet my needs. That's why I have to use WMP plugins for now.
Using WMP plugin means there is no support for other platforms than Windows. I know that. But even under Windows there are problems. There are various plugins and the only one which I managed to put in my widget is called "Microsoft® Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin" - it is an official WMP plugin from Microsoft. However, because of some Opera Widgets limitations and bugs
<object type="application/x-oleobject"> isn't available. I have to use
<embed type="application/x-mplayer2"> which has got less features (but fortunately I can still change stream address, stop/play and adjust volume).
Good plugin detection script is needed because the code works only with that particular plugin and only with Opera 10.50+. My target is to make RMF RDS' radio playback work on flash because it would be less problematic and allow non-windows users to use that widget's feature. But for now we have to live with WMP plugin. When improper (or no) WMP plugin is detected, playback functions are disabled and
widget.showNotification is shown with a message that "Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin" is needed. And this is everything I can put in that notification because they have limited length.
A click handler is available, but
it is not executed after clicking. I have to believe a message on widget page will be enough for everyone.
My Opera
